The Abomination
by Sophia Hawkins
Summary: When the Watchers interfered with the wrong Immortal's life, Kronos declared war.
1. Chapter 1

Author's Note: Well folks, I'm taking a break from the Dearest Brother series at the moment and am now working on something quite different. To everybody who dares see just what I've come up with now, I hope you'll enjoy it.

The Abomination

1993

He felt it. He stopped in his tracks and turned around. There was another one like himself nearby, an old one. Not as old as himself, but all the same, old enough. Kronos looked around his darkened surroundings, waiting for the other Immortal to strike. While he couldn't pinpoint the other's exact location, he knew they were somewhere along the dark alley in front of him. Taking out his sword, he called out "Come out now, make it quick."

The response was a loud crashing noise from another direction, he turned to look and was thrown off guard until the other figure had come out of hiding and was standing right across from him.

"Kronos?"

At the call of his name, Kronos turned around and saw her. A woman he hadn't seen for a few years and he was honestly surprised to see her again. When he cast his eyes upon her, something happened and his senses seemed to disappear. He dropped his sword and before he knew it, she had jumped into his arms and wrapped hers around his neck.

"I thought you were dead," he said.

She shook her head, "I can assure you I'm _not_ dead. Are you allright?"

Except for a sudden ripping feeling in his back, yes he was quite allright. He carefully set her down and wondered what the hell happened. Either something had happened since they last met and he wasn't as strong as he used to be, or, he thought, she was smuggling something again.

"I think we better get out of here before we make a scene," Kronos told her.

"Right behind you."

Kronos picked up his sword and stopped. "No, wait."

"What is it?" she asked.

He turned to her. "Let's go to your place instead."

She smiled, "Allright, follow me."

"Wait," Kronos said as he grabbed her wrist.

"Again?" she asked.

"What name do you go by now?"

"The same I always have," she answered.

As they made their way through the dark streets of the city that night, Kronos thought back to when they first met. That was a long time ago when time wasn't much of the essence, not to him anyway. Thousands of years and two continents full of sand and blood ago, that was when they had first encountered each other. A day he still clearly remembered.

* * *

Where he was, he didn't know. He'd been riding for days and anymore all the land before him looked the same as the last. As he wandered around the deserted land he thought it was ironic that the place his horse chose to stop after three days of passing tribes and villages, was where everything around was dead. There were people sprawled out all over the land and whatever had happened to them, it had showed less mercy than the Horsemen did.

These were, as far as he was concerned, the most pathetic sort of people that could ever exist, the ones that had nothing worth taking, and were already dead before he came. Why he was staying, he didn't know…but he had a feeling that there was more to this spot, than what he was seeing. Even though he knew he was alone, and nobody who was around was going to get up, there was still an uneasiness about him, he drew his sword just in case he might be wrong. His pride got in the way of allowing such a thought normally, but he reminded himself, he'd been wrong before. Methos was a perfect example of that.

Just the thought of his brother, and Kronos' hands started clenching into fists. He could've killed Methos for abandoning them, he _would've_, and if he ever ran into Methos again, and he _knew_ he would someday, he would kill him then. Only, he knew, he wouldn't make it quick like Methos would want. As the thought seemed to consume him, he shook his head as if answering himself, when he found Methos he was going to make him suffer for the longest time before he finally took his head.

At the exact moment that that thought entered his head, he felt it. Turning around he looked to see who his opponent was. It couldn't be…he knew he could never get so lucky as to find Methos _this_ soon after getting out of that pit. He had to stop and concentrate on the Quickening, it was so low and so weak he could barely feel it at all…almost as if it were from…

That unpleasant thought gathered in his mind…of all the corpses he passed, he must have missed one that hadn't fully died yet. Well, he thought, it wouldn't take long to send them the rest of the way, he just had to find out which one it was. After taking a few more steps, something happened and he felt like he'd been knocked on the side of his head. He nearly fell to his feet, he was dizzy, and he felt some God-awful vibration in his ears. Looking around, everything seemed to be moving in one sickening circle and he wasn't sure he could stand up. What the hell was going on? Then he realized that he'd been wrong, the presence he felt was that of someone who was _already_ Immortal. Getting to his feet again he looked around, and feared he was going insane. He saw nobody alive, there was no opponent, just sand and dead bodies as far as the eye could see.

Then he stopped, off in the distance, one of the bodies had moved, not much, but enough for him to notice. As he got closer, he realized it was a woman, a young one, and a scrawny one, but a woman no less. He took another step towards her and he stopped.

The woman was of unusual color, not dark like most people who toiled in the desert sun, but also not pale, certainly not like Methos. She had a short head of hair of unusual color, normally hair cut as short as hers could make a woman look more like a man, but there wasn't anything that could make any mistake about what she was. She was dressed in what used to be a white fur tunic, now it, like her, was covered in dirt and sand and plenty more. Kronos knew if he was close enough to feel her, then she could with no mistake feel his Quickening as well, but she didn't move. She had one arm under her head and she seemed to be trying to sleep, and that idea made Kronos laugh.

He came up closer to the woman until he was practically on top of her, she hadn't moved, she didn't open her eyes, but he knew she was alive. Feeling like a cat with its prey, he decided to have some fun with his victim first. He nudged her in the ribs with his foot, she opened one eye, told him to leave her alone and turned on her side. This time, Kronos kicked her, not so much to hurt her, just to get her attention.

"Leave me alone," she said, "I want to die."

"You stupid woman," he almost laughed, "You _can't_ die."

"Yes I can," she replied, "I've done it several times before. Now go away."

She turned back onto her back and closed her eyes. Now Kronos was curious.

"What happened here?" he asked, meaning what killed everybody.

"Plague," the woman answered.

"And you?" he asked.

She turned back around towards him and said, "You don't give up easily, do you?"

Her voice was strong but she couldn't talk much and she had trouble swallowing in between, Kronos knew this was because whatever the plague was, it had left any food or water in the area, unfit to be eaten or drunk by anything alive.

"Since you seem to think you know so damn much about something, maybe _you_ can tell me what's going on," the woman said.

Kronos was still feeling in a bit of a playful mood, with the tip of his blade, he pushed back the bottom of her tunic to get a look at her. She didn't appreciate it and so swung her foot under his and made him fall. On the way down he came to the conclusion from what he had seen, that she had starved to death more than once already.

Getting himself up again, he settled for a sort of kneeling position to remain in while he spoke with her.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Abigail," she answered not fondly.

"Well…you," he said, "Are Immortal."

"Very funny," she said, thinking he was fooling her.

Kronos grabbed her boney arm and said, "Why do you think you've survived this as far as you have?"

"Oh what would you know?" she asked as she turned on her side again.

Kronos grabbed her by her ankles and turned her back to face him again. "I know that you're like me."

She laughed, "I'm _nothing_ like you, I never could be."

"No?" Kronos grabbed her wrist and held his dagger to her palm, "Tell me if I cut you open, that you won't heal."

Then he stopped and let her go. He'd forgotten that when an Immortal went too long without food or water, they _didn't_ heal as quickly as they normally did, and by the looks of this woman, she didn't have the blood to spare.

"So what do you want with me?" she asked.

He had to think about that himself.

"I don't know," he answered.

"Then go away and let me die here in misery," she told him.

This time she turned on her stomach and this was when Kronos noticed the red stains on the back of her tunic. Pushing up the back, he saw a small dagger lodged in her thigh, there was no doubt that it had cut into the bone.

Subtleness not being his strong point this millennium, he pushed her to wake her up again.

"What do you want now?" she asked.

"How did this happen?" he asked as he pointed to the dagger.

She looked back as if she'd forgotten about it. "Some bastard," was her only response. Then she turned to Kronos and asked him, "Can you get it out?"

If he couldn't he'd have one hell of a time trying. He didn't know what it was but there was something to this woman that he liked. Still being the playful bastard he was in this lifetime, he smirked and asked, "If I get it out, will you kiss me?"

"Sure," she replied, not taking him seriously, "Hell if you get it out, I'll _marry_ you."

Kronos positioned himself behind her so he could get a good grip on the dagger's handle.

"It'll hurt," he warned her.

"And here I was just enjoying myself up till you came along," she said.

He expected her to scream once he started removing it but instead she just moaned and dug her nails deeper and deeper into the sand. By the time the blade came out, and that wasn't anytime soon on account of the bone it was stuck in, she wasn't making any noise at all. Kronos turned her over and found that she'd passed out sometime during the ordeal. He pulled the small and frail body against his own, and he wondered what to do next.

Centuries had passed, his brothers were no more, he was alone now, and had been for a long while. As for women? The last woman he could clearly remember was…Cassandra. His hands clenched again in remembrance. Then he looked again at the woman before him now. He picked her up and carried her over to his horse, he put her up first then got behind her. He kept one arm around her as he got them out of there and into what could at least pass for civilization.

* * *

He got them a room in an inn and got some water, he forced some down her throat which she took with no trouble, but still wouldn't wake up. After that, he stripped her of her clothes and after washing her a bit, put her in bed, where she stayed for three days before she awoke. Every day she would somehow stay asleep when he lifted her head up and poured water down her throat, and he began to wonder if she would last as an Immortal, or if he would have to take her head before long.

On the third day, Kronos awoke when Abigail got up and saw both of them in bed and she started screaming, "Oh God, oh my God, we didn't—I slept with _you_?"

"Yes, and no…don't flatter yourself my dear, you've done nothing _but_ sleep for the last three days," Kronos explained.

She laid back again and closed her eyes, then she felt an immense weight cover her body. She looked up and Kronos was on top of her.

"If I'm not mistaken," Kronos said, "You owe me something."

"I'm _not_ going to marry you."

"No, come on…you know what I want."

"If I do, can I go back to sleep?" she asked.

She didn't wait for his answer, as soon as he kissed her, she fell back against the bed asleep. Oh, Kronos thought, this was going to be fun.

* * *

He spent the next few days trying to get some food down her throat without it coming back up. Once she was able to get through the day without becoming ill, they left the inn.

"Where are we going?" she asked him.

"I don't know," he replied.

She maintained a strong grip around his waist as they rode out of the city, and Kronos didn't know where they were going, but he didn't want to go back to any place that would remind him of his Judas brother.

He looked up, there was no sun beating down on them because gray clouds covered the sky today, but he didn't care. He didn't care if they got caught in a storm, he didn't care about much anymore, he just rode until he couldn't recognize the surroundings or the people, and Abigail's grip loosened. Looking over his shoulder he saw she was falling asleep, so he jerked the reins for the horse to stop. He got her down and laid her out on the ground. The sky above grew darker and he knew it would start raining soon.

Now he was starting to feel tired as well and he sank down next to her body and felt he could fall asleep then and there, everything be damned.

The rain came but didn't pour down on them, in fact it was a relief after the heat of the last few days. The two of them drank from a wineskin and each tried to find out more about the other than they already knew.

"So you were living in the village when the plague came."

Abigail lay on her side and nodded her head, "I couldn't figure out what I had done that was so terrible that I didn't die along with them."

Kronos reached over and stroked through her hair, "You didn't do anything, whatever it was that made you Immortal, that was decided before you were born. When did you find out you couldn't die?"

"Oh…about…20 days ago I think it was," she said, "The people were dying, everybody was panicked…one woman accused me of stealing her baby…her baby died as soon as it was born from the plague, but she didn't remember it. She stabbed me right here," Abigail patted her stomach, "And when I…came back to life, everyone around me was dead. The horses were dead, the mules were dead, the water was poison, there was no way for me to get out so I just waited to die. Then a stranger came through, and soon it spread to him, he went crazy and started fighting with me, he rammed that dagger into me…but I killed him first. What about you? Where do you come from?"

He wasn't sure how to answer that, but somehow he came about telling her of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and their two thousand year reign.

"The end of the world," she said humorously, "So what happened?"

For a minute, Kronos didn't say anything and Abigail wondered if he would. Then finally he answered, "My brother, Methos," he said the name as if it burnt his mouth to do so, "Left…I told him the only way he would leave would be to leave his head, the bastard poisoned me and threw me into a pit and locked me in. That was a thousand years ago."

"I'm sorry," she said.

She looked at Kronos and she knew that what he had to say next, was something he would never tell another living soul, and if she told, he would probably kill her.

"I _hated_ being alone," Kronos said, "All those years passed and nobody…I hated it, I hated _him_, I could have just _killed_ him…"

He knew he'd said too much. "I'm sorry."

She reached over and patted his thigh, "That's allright, Kronos."

He pulled her close to him and kissed her. "If you don't mind my saying it, Abigail, you are one strange woman."

"Why's that?"

"Do you believe me when I tell you what I was? What we were?"

"Sure, why not?"

"So why aren't you afraid?"

She giggled, "No man whose own brother can poison him without his knowing it and toss him down a well for a thousand years is going to scare me, I don't care what you were."

Kronos thought about it all and he supposed it didn't sound very good for his part at all. And in spite of himself and what he felt at that moment, he laughed.

* * *

1867

Kronos groaned as he finally managed to dig himself out of the grave they'd put him in. He was thankful that deep graves weren't common around here otherwise he'd be there until dawn the next day. At first he thought his pounding headache had been from returning to life buried in the ground, but now he realized that it was because there was another Immortal nearby…if it was that bastard with the Texas Rangers…

"El Gato."

He jerked his neck around and saw a woman laying on a tombstone near his grave. She was dressed as a whore in a loose fitting dress, and she smelled like one too. He recognized the woman.

"Abigail?"

"One and only," she replied with a grin on her face.

As he pulled himself to his feet he saw she was looking after herself currently, she had a gun belt tied around the waist of her dress with two pistols resting in it.

"Charming."

"The Sheriff had a little 'accident' and he ain't gonna be needing these where he's going," she said as she gestured to the guns, "So do you want to explain yourself? What's happened to you lately?"

"Lately?" he repeated, "Well for one, I had a little run in with the Texas Rangers."

"And a friend," she added.

"What?"

"And they had a friend…"

"Yes…if I ever find out _who_ he is…"

Abigail laughed, "You never cease to amaze me, El Gato, the man who terrified the whole state, who slaughtered many, taken down by a damned Scottish bairn!"

"What?" Kronos asked.

"That man was Duncan MacLeod, a highlander from Scotland…and a damned infant still," she laughed, "He's not even 300 years old yet and he killed you!"

"He did not!" Kronos replied, "I would have killed him if those damn hunters wouldn't have interrupted."

"And thus you get a coffin and a quaint little funeral," she said, and she nearly fell off the tomb from laughing so hard.

Kronos turned up his nose as he brushed the dirt off his clothes.

"Come here," he said.

"What?" she asked.

"I said come here."

She got off the tomb and went over to him. Slowly and almost cautiously, he put his arms around her and pulled her close to him.

"Like old times," she said, "I've missed this."

However Kronos had other things on his mind. He pressed her body against his and felt down her back, and felt the front of her body pressed against his, and came to a conclusion.

"I knew it!"

"What?" she asked.

"Not too long ago the Texas Rangers were looking for me in connection to a bank robbery, but I never set foot near the damned place. _You_ robbed it and the blame was put on me because it was convenient."

She played innocent. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You stole the money and stuffed it down your girdle," Kronos accused her.

"I did not," she said.

"You want me to turn you upside down and shake you?" Kronos asked.

"You wouldn't dare," she smugly replied.

"Have it your way," Kronos grabbed for her ankles.

Abigail backed up and reached down her dress, "Okay, okay, you win."

She pulled out wrapped stacks of bills and dropped them on the ground. Hundreds of dollars, thousands even, all that he'd never seen before a day in his life, and all part of a crime that the public held him guilty for.

"I hanged for what you did," Kronos said.

She became serious then as she responded, "Well I'm sorry, but until today I didn't even know who you were, let alone that we were in the same area. How did you know that it was me who stole the money?"

"Because," Kronos said, "In all the years I've known you, you've always been a scrawny woman, even in the beginning when you put back the weight you lost when you first died, you were still a boney creature…and with that money stuffed down your clothes you appeared much larger than I remember you, and you felt bulkier as well."

She smiled coyly and reached into one of the pockets on her dress and offered him a cigarette.

"What are you going to do now?" she asked.

He told her he wasn't sure. He was starting to get tired of being massacred on a weekly basis by the locals.

"Well," Abigail said as she pointed to the money on the ground, "There's over ten thousand dollars in that, why don't we get a room at a hotel and get some of that gunpowder whiskey that's filling the saloons these days?"

"Not here," Kronos said.

"Of course not here, people are going to find your grave empty and there will be a massive panic…no, let's get out of here. Let's go…I know, let's go to the Arizona Territory, nobody will be looking for El Gato there," she explained.

He looked at her for a minute before saying, "Sometimes I wonder why I come back to you."

Abigail picked up the money and answered, "Because if you didn't you'd have nobody to talk to and you would go crazy and you know it."

* * *

1993

It was well after midnight when they reached Abigail's home. She turned on the light and they headed into the kitchen. Kronos noticed that while it wasn't cold out, she kept her long coat on as she went around the kitchen.

"So," she said as she put a kettle of water on the stove, "What have you been up to lately?"

"Very little," Kronos replied as he sat down at the table, "What about you? Still holding up banks?"

"Not so much anymore, banks are becoming one of the worst places _to_ rob," she replied, "All that security and all…if you can pull it off, the payoff is worth it because banks carry most of the money, but that's becoming a thing of the past really."

"So what are you robbing now?" Kronos asked.

"Well let's see, I robbed…two antique stores, a couple of gas stations…a few motels."

"Motels?" Kronos repeated.

"You'd be surprised how much money they can take in when it's the right season. I guess you could say I never really fell into any place on the level that fit me. Oh I tried, believe me I did…but nothing stuck, you know? Once I got a job as a grave digger, I liked it, it was good honest work…but they had their complaints, first they said I wasn't making the holes deep enough, then they said I was making them too deep. Well you know for the longest time when we were alive there weren't very deep graves being used…and I guess it just stuck with me."

The kettle started screaming and Abigail fixed a cup of coffee and set it down by Kronos.

"You aren't having any?"

"I hate coffee," she said, "I only keep it for company."

Kronos looked up at her. "Did you put something in it?"

Smugly she replied, "Maybe I did and maybe I didn't, only way you'll know is to drink it."

He started to, he may die in a crumpling heap of his own body but he wasn't going to let anybody think that she could intimidate him.

"I also once had a job working at a maximum security prison…I worked on death row…but they fired me," she said.

"Why?" Kronos asked.

"Well…you know how when you electrocute somebody, you're supposed to make sure they're strapped in real tight so they can't move, and that the thing they put on their heads is supposed to be good and wet otherwise they catch on fire?"

"Yeah."

"Well I didn't and that little bastard jiggled right out of the chair and onto the floor and nearly burnt the whole damn prison down."

Half of the coffee he drank came back up as he laughed himself nearly sick.

"Well I'm glad you're having such a good time with this, are you going to survive?" she asked.

"I'm sorry," he said as he pulled himself together, "So what have you been doing lately?"

"Basically nothing…I…well I think I'm getting tired of it all," Abigail explained, "I've pulled off so many heists, and it gets tired after a while. Besides, there's still enough money left from it all to keep me taken care of until the turn of the century so I don't see much reason to rush into anything at the moment."

There was silence for a minute but it ended when she said, "I suppose I ought to set up a place for you to sleep for the night."

Before he could answer her, she grabbed him and pulled him along up the stairs and down a dark corridor. She opened a door and turned on the light and they walked in.

"This is the guest room," she said, "I think it'll do for the night."

Now Kronos was seriously beginning to wonder if she poisoned him. His head was throbbing and his eyes hurt too much to keep open. He hadn't felt like this since…Methos, and the wine, and the pit.

"Abigail," he started to say.

However she wasn't interested in hearing him out, she grabbed him and practically threw him onto the bed and she undressed him and settled him in under the covers. He started laughing.

"What's so funny?" she asked.

"Just a thought, if it's work you want, you should try working in a nursery."

"Nursery?" she repeated.

"Oh sure, you'd probably be perfect nursing the bloody infants," he laughed.

She tucked the covers in tightly around his neck for that comment and told him to go to sleep, she would see him in the morning.

When she left the room, Kronos turned on his side and fell into a deep and empty sleep.

* * *

He woke up and it was still dark. The light from the hall shone in, nearly blinding him. He grabbed the clock by the bed and saw that it was a little after 4 in the morning, and Kronos couldn't for the life of him remember what had gotten him up. Then he heard it again. Abigail was downstairs and it sounded like she was choking. He got up and rushed down the back stairs to find out what had happened.

She sat at the table and he saw she was still wearing her long coat, she'd never taken it off. Her face was buried in her hands as she cried.

"Abigail."

The single word shot through the room like a bullet being fired from a gun.

"What's wrong?" he asked as he stepped closer to her.

She saw him but wouldn't look at him; she didn't want to tell him what was the matter.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Oh Kronos, I should have told you sooner but I couldn't, I was afraid," she told him.

Now he was wondering where the hell he was. Never in all the years that they had been meeting up again was she _ever_ afraid to tell him anything.

"Tell me what?" he asked, "What is it? What's wrong?"

She stood up and jerked at the buttons on her coat and ripped it open revealing a large bulge in her stomach.

"That," she cried as she hung her head low, "That's what's wrong."

Kronos had seen it enough times in his life to know what had happened despite it being impossible, but still he found himself reaching out and feeling her stomach and he could feel a baby in it kicking, and suddenly he was as scared as she was.

"Oh my God, Abigail," he said.

"I didn't want to tell you," she explained, "But there was nobody else."

He pulled her into his arms and she clung to him as if for dear life. They slowly sank to the floor, both of them wondering what the hell was going to happen now. One thing Kronos knew for certain, somebody was going to die for this.


	2. Chapter 2

"What happened?" Kronos asked when Abigail had calmed down, "Tell me."

She tried pulling herself together.

"I don't really know how it happened," she said, "I just remember somebody jumping me one night when I was heading home, and before I knew it there were half a dozen of them."

"Of who?"

"I don't know, just a bunch of men dressed in black clothes, all with these purple tattoos on their wrists…they, they knocked me out and when I woke up I was strapped to some sort of operating table. I don't know where I was…but it was dark, and cold, and there were all these, knives and scalpels and bottles and needles and tubes full of things," she explained.

Kronos knew that she was trying to explain it the best she could without falling apart again, so he didn't interrupt, and he didn't push her to continue, she came around to it by herself.

"I don't know _what_ they did…I mean you know me, I never had a mind for what science came up with or anything like that. I was always interested in the here and now, not what causes it or what makes it happen. But…they were talking amongst themselves when I woke up, and I had this horrible pain that shot from my groin all the way up to my chest…it felt like I'd been ripped open or something. I heard them talking and one of them said that it was too early to determine if the procedure had been a success or a failure. I didn't know what the hell they were talking about."

"How'd you get out?" he asked.

"I acted like I was still unconscious and waited until they removed the straps to move me to another room for more experiments, and I attacked. I bashed one guy's head into the wall, I stabbed another to death with a scalpel, I…I don't really know how I got out…I just remember grabbing somebody's clothes and running. And I didn't go home, I just ran until I was out of town and out of state, and I came here. Then later, I could remember hearing them talk about if the experiment worked, it would be the first in the history of the world, the first time an Immortal…carried a child."

"When did you know?" Kronos asked, and she knew he meant when did she know she was pregnant.

"I knew the day it happened," Abigail answered.

Kronos looked at her.

"I just knew," she said, "I knew that there wasn't any way the experiment wouldn't take."

"How long ago was that?" Kronos asked.

She looked down at the floor, refusing to look at him, refusing to answer.

"Abigail."

She shook her head, she didn't want to answer.

He reached over and touched her and he expected her to jump out of her skin, but she was too exhausted.

"How long ago was it?" he asked again.

She gave in and answered.

"Six months."

Kronos could swear he heard his heart stop. Six months, meaning that that child in her could damn well be coming out at any time, if it would live would be an entirely different story.

"And you didn't tell anybody," he noted.

"There wasn't anybody _to_ tell except you and I didn't know where you were," she said.

"Well," he said, "I'm here now, and I'm not going anywhere."

He grabbed her coat and slid it off her body and helped her to her feet so he could get a better look at her.

"I'm scared, Kronos," she said.

"I know."

"I mean I've never been this scared in my life. This isn't something I know anything about."

He looked and saw that she was having trouble staying awake, he remembered she hadn't gone to sleep that night.

"Come on," he said, "Let's get you to bed. We'll figure this out in the morning."

"Kronos…" she said as they headed up the stairs.

"What is it?"

"I…I want this baby," she told him, "More than anything. I've always wanted a child and no matter what happens, I'm not giving it up now that I've got one."

"I wouldn't expect you to," he replied, "I know what this means to you."

She nodded. "I've always wanted to have a baby, and now that I've got one it scares the hell out of me."

They reached her bedroom and Kronos pushed her in. He turned on the light and helped her undress. She got out of her boots and her jeans but she wouldn't let him see how she looked now under her shirt. He laid her out in the bed and drew up the covers.

"Now you go to sleep, and in the morning," he said, "We'll figure out what we're doing."

"Okay," she tiredly agreed.

"Abigail."

She opened her eyes and looked up at him.

"What are you hoping it is?"

She smiled sheepishly, "I want a girl."

The answer seemed to satisfy him.

"You don't mind if I stay here, do you?" he asked.

"Not at all, stranger," she replied.

Kronos picked up a chair and pulled it over next to the bed and sat down to watch her.

"What about you?" she asked.

"_What_ about me?"

"You said you weren't going anywhere…does that mean you're going to be the father?"

"I…"

He stopped and thought about what she just said, and he laughed.

"I guess I am."

"So what do you want, a boy or a girl?"

"It doesn't matter."

"Of course it does," she told him.

"I'll be happy with whatever it is…so…six months along, how have you been so far?"

She groaned, "Well I throw up every day, sometimes more than others, everything I smell is nauseating, I still have an immense pain from my groin to my chest and I'm convinced that my baby's not even born yet and already it's trying to kill me."

"Ohh she is not."

"Oh yes she is, what more, this," she gesutred to her large stomach, "I don't know how this happened because I'm not eating anymore than I always have when you called me boney, and even what I do eat I can hardly keep it down."

"I know you're scared," Kronos told her, "But try not to worry. I'm here now and I'm going to take care of you, so just relax and try to sleep."

"I'll try," she said, "But it's not easy."

* * *

When the sun came up the next morning, Abigail was still in a dead sleep. Kronos had stayed up the rest of the night watching her and thinking. He was scared out of his mind, not as much as she was, he knew this. He wasn't dumb enough to think anybody could be as scared as a woman carrying a baby, he knew better than that.

He also thought about the irony of it all, after all these years, centuries, she was going to be a mother, and he a father. The most ironic part of it was that they had been married for over a hundred years and never even considered the idea of a child. As he sat across from her, watching her sleep, his mind went back to the year 1886.

They had stayed together for almost 20 years following the Agua Dulce incident. Neither went straight but neither had in those 20 years gone to jail or been killed either. When the money from the first bank robbery ran out, Abigail went out and did it again. It was then that Kronos realized how she pulled it off. Nobody thought a woman capable of doing such a thing and she played on that by dressing as a man and covering her face with a mask.

Kronos went along with her the first time to see just what she did and also incase she needed help. The only thing about it all was that she never struck in the daytime. She got her hands on some dynamite and waited until night when the bank was closed and nobody was around. She blasted open the front doors and went in and went through everything herself. She blew open the vaults so that the only thing left to do was get the money and run. Of course the noise from the dynamite was enough to draw anybody who wasn't deaf, but by the time they came running, the two thieves were long gone.

They lived in and out of hotels and saloons and didn't give much thought to anything else. Incase anybody were to ever find out what they had done, and come for them, they wanted to leave behind as little as possible so they put down no roots and gave no thought to finding a permanent home.

One night neither of them could sleep, they went outside for some air and Abigail sat and listened to Kronos rant and rave as he paced back and forth talking about something or other.

"If you keep that up you're going to make your own grave," she told him.

He looked down at the ground and jumped over to another part that he hadn't walked over a hundred times already.

She took out a cigarette and laughed, "You know, Kronos, you are so much like MacLeod, it would be funny if it weren't so tragic."

"I am _nothing_ like MacLeod," Kronos insisted.

"Oh _yes_ you are," she replied, "I know, you both think you're always right, you both have to have the last say, and you both have to be the one who decides who lives and who dies. You're exactly like him, don't try and tell me otherwise, Kronos, I've known you too long to believe you aren't."

He didn't know what to say to that so he sat down beside her and waited for one of them to come up with something else to say.

"It's getting rather boring out here, don't you think?" she asked, "I think we should pack up and leave."

"And go where?" Kronos asked.

"Anywhere, we go can anywhere we want."

"And do what?" Kronos asked.

She had to think about it for a minute.

"I know," she said, "Let's get married."

"Married?"

It sounded like she was joking, when she saw he wasn't as enthusiastic about the idea she said, "Okay then, we'll just forget I ever brought it up."

"Why would you want to get married?" Kronos asked.

"Well let's face it, we've been together off and on for…what, 800 years?

"I'd say that sounds about right," he said.

"And we've spent the last 20 together, why not?"

Kronos didn't answer, and that brought her to ask him something else.

"Kronos…do you love me?"

"What?"

"I said…"

"I heard you, what do you mean? Of course I do!"

"Oh really?" she asked, "All these years we've spent together, you never so much as touched me, why is that?"

He got up and turned away from her, he didn't want to answer, but she persisted, she demanded to know.

"Don't tell me," she said as she got up, "Not only are you not interested in me enough to marry me, but you're not even interested in me enough to touch me."

"That's not it!"

"Then what is it?" she demanded to know.

He looked at her with a most serious expression on his face. "You remember when I told you about the Four Horsemen?"

"What about them?"

"What we were, do you remember?"

"Sure I remember, you were the end of the world, so what?"

"I was the most brutal man who ever lived."

"Well now I wouldn't say that," Abigail smugly replied.

"No? Then who? Who could possibly be anymore barbaric than I was?"

"Lope De Aguirre," she answered.

"My point is you're the only thing left in my life that's any good and I don't want to hurt you," he said.

She put her arms around him and assured him, "You won't hurt me."

"How do you know?" he asked.

"Because I know you," she replied.

* * *

A hundred years ago he had absolutely no idea if they would get through their marriage without killing each other and _still_ he knew more of what he was doing then than he did now. Like any husband he just sat there worrying, and he worried himself to the point of exhaustion and finally sleep.

He awoke a few hours later to find the bed empty and made again. As he got up he tried to figure out where she was since he could still feel her presence. Then he heard something. First he heard a ringing in his ears, and then when that passed he heard the water running in the shower. He stood up and fell to the floor and once again wondered if she might have put something in his coffee last night. Getting up again he let himself into the bathroom and saw the silhouette of her body against the curtain. Six months and already she looked ready to pop, Good Lord. He only hoped that whatever those bastards had done to her, it would only result in _one_ baby.

And then a thought came to his mind. He couldn't remember what it was, but there was something to Abigail's description of the men that reminded him of the last time they saw each other. That was five years ago and they had both been surrounded by several men in long black jackets and despite it being night, dark glasses, and he would swear that on one he grabbed he saw a purple tattoo on the bastard's wrist. What the hell it was he didn't know and even if he could remember he wouldn't, but it all seemed to go together. That night he had escaped an explosion from a bomb they had planted that damaged an entire block's worth, and when the smoke cleared, Abigail was nowhere to be found. So where the hell had she been for these past five years?

The water shut off and Abigail grabbed a towel as she stepped out of the shower, though it didn't cover her too well anymore.

"I must be a real sight to see," she said as she caught him gazing at her.

He smiled at her. "You're beautiful."

"No I'm not, I'm a mess…right now I stand at five feet four inches and I weigh 196 pounds and I still have three months of this pregnancy to go. If I continue at this rate, by the time this kid's born, I think I'll be near 300 pounds, and I have enough trouble getting around now as it is. I'm worried Kronos, so far I've managed to avoid coming in contact with other Immortals, but still I'm not as fast now as I used to be. And every day I have to wonder, when the time comes, is my baby going to be safe? Will it survive?"

Kronos had considered that possibility too, no matter how hard Immortals tried; they couldn't stay away from other Immortals forever.

"Have you considered going somewhere until it's born?"

"Holy ground? Oh no, I can't go there…with all the things I've done in my lifetime, I'll probably burst into flames the second I set foot on it," she said.

"Well don't worry, if anybody _does_ come, they're going to have to get through me to get to you and they _won't_ get through me."

"You sound pretty sure of yourself," Abigail said.

"I always am."

"And thus you spent 1000 years in a pit."

Suddenly he didn't feel so sure of himself but he wouldn't tell her that.

* * *

"There's just a lot of things that I wonder about," she said later that day, "Even if this _does_ go like a normal pregnancy, what happens? What if something happens and I lose the baby while it's still in me? What if they did something to me that it'll be born Immortal? What then?"

"I don't know, Abigail."

Kronos didn't like her worrying so much, for her own well being and that of the child's. He knew that there could very well be a chance of her losing the baby as a result of all the stress she was in, but he wasn't about to tell her that either. He knew she had every right to be worried.

"But Abigail, there's nothing that can be done until the baby is born, and if you don't find some way to calm down, that could be any time now."

"But there's something else I wonder, and I can't help _but_ wonder about it," she said.

"What's that?"

"Kronos, we both know it takes two people to make a baby…or at least the proper equipment from two people, meaning this child has to have some biological…" She couldn't complete that thought. "So whose is it?"

"I thought about that as well," Kronos told her, "But I guess it doesn't matter much now."

"It does to me…kids turn out like their parents, sometimes without ever meeting them or knowing anything about them…just what kind of child am I going to be raising?"

"I wish I knew, but I don't, nobody can ever be sure of that," he said.

"I know, I just feel like if I don't ask these questions that have been going around in my mind for the last six months, I'll go crazy, and I've fought a long time to keep my sanity, I've no intention of losing it now," she replied.

Then she started moaning, "Ohhh I feel sick again."

She leaned over the kitchen sink and choked a couple of times but nothing came of it.

"Are you feeling any better?" Kronos asked.

"Not really," she replied as she sat down at the table, "Right now I have a pretty good idea of what Rosemary must've felt."

"Rosemary?"

She turned to him, "Oh come now, you remember that story."

He had to think about it for a minute, and then it came to him. "Oh, oh! Right..."

"Of course, I don't think this is the same problem," Abigail said, "But still I would swear my baby's trying to kill me."

"Oh she is not," Kronos insisted.

"What makes you so sure? She's going to be your kid as well, and if she'd take after anybody it would be her bastard of a father," Abigail told him.

"I'm sorry, Abigail, but flattery's not going to work today," Kronos replied.

Abigail shook her head in defeat and closed her eyes half of the way. "I just don't know what I'm going to do," she said.

"What you're going to do," he told her, "Is have this baby."

"And then what?" she asked, "What's next? It might be born a normal child, but then again it might be born as we were…or, God only knows what they did to me, they might have seen to it that it's born as we are now. What if that's the case?"

Kronos didn't know anymore what they would do than she did, but he wasn't going to admit it. "We'll just have to deal with that when it happens, not before, but I still wonder if perhaps we should move you somewhere else for the time being."

She shook her head, "I'm not going anywhere, Kronos. I'm too far along to pack up and go somewhere else now."

"Only six months, you might be pregnant for another three or four."

"Or it could be born in two months," Abigail replied, "Or one month or…or anytime now. I mean…how early are babies born?"

"Well," Kronos started to explain, "You're probably near a month past the point of birth being an impossibility for any time now."

"That's what I was afraid of," she said.


	3. Chapter 3

That night as the two lay side by side in bed, Kronos listened to Abigail rant and rave. Becoming pregnant had made her above all else it seemed, very bitter. She had been talking his ears off for the last hour about all the things in her life that she hated.

"I hate being sick everyday," she said, "I hate eating crackers every morning, I hate drinking so much ginger beer that I'm about to drown myself in it. I hate not being able to sleep on my back, I hate going to the bathroom 30 times every day…and as horrible as it sounds, I hate the baby kicking me all the time, it just adds to the pain I've been in for the last six months…and I hate worrying. I spend everyday wondering if every little thing is going to hurt the baby…"

"It's your kid, Abigail," Kronos told her, "I don't think it's possible to hurt it."

"You think so?" she asked.

She reached over to Kronos' side of the bed and took the can of beer he was drinking and took a swig of it.

"I wish I knew," she said, "I wish I knew how it was doing. But there's nobody and nothing in this world that can tell me that. The only thing _to_ do is wait until it's born."

Neither of them said anything for a minute, and Kronos wasn't sure what _to_ say. He heard Abigail sigh as she sprawled out on her side of the bed and looked up at the ceiling.

"Kronos."

"What?"

"Tell me…tell me about Methos…your brother…what was he like?"

"Oh Lord," Kronos groaned as he sprawled out alongside her, "Why do you want to know?"

She shrugged her shoulders, "You never told me much about him…what was he like?"

"He was," Kronos started.

"And go back _before_ the part where he was a pain in the ass."

"Well then there's not much to tell, is there?" Kronos asked, "He was always that, just some days more than others."

"I'm sure he thought the same thing about you," Abigail replied, "So why'd you keep him around for so long?"

"Well…I don't know anymore," Kronos said.

"Liar," she said, "You needed him."

"I…" Kronos started to disagree but he knew she was right, "I did, a long time ago."

"So what happened?" Abigail asked.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Why? What happened? Why did he leave?" she asked.

"I don't know, I don't know! One day he was…he…told me he was finished. He said…he said 'the more I study the more aware I become'."

"Of what?" Abigail asked.

"What he was, he said…he left me, because he thought he had something to learn."

"Maybe he did," she suggested.

Kronos looked at her as if she were a complete stranger, he shook his head in defeat and laid against her shoulder.

"I hated him," he said, "When he left me…I could've just killed him."

"I know, dear, I know," she replied as she wrapped her arm around him.

"He shouldn't have left me."

"I know."

They fell asleep that night as they were, side by side, neither aware that the other was crying, though both were for different reasons.

* * *

"Have you thought of any names yet?" Kronos asked her the next morning.

"Uh…no, not really," Abigail confessed.

"Why not?"

"Well I'm confused, when you have kids are you supposed to name them after somebody in particular or not? I mean how do they figure what to name their kids?" she asked.

"Just whatever you think might fit them, I guess," Kronos replied.

She thought about it for a minute but didn't seem to come up with anything.

"I never knew anybody important to name my kid after…and that…that's the way they used to do it, name the baby after somebody they knew as an honor…but I don't know anybody to name mine after…"

Abigail sat at the kitchen table in silence for a moment, as if she were considering something.

"How did you get your name?" she asked him.

He shrugged his shoulders, "I just always had it. What about you? Where'd you get your name from?"

"I named myself," she answered, "I never had any parents, or family, I belonged to nobody and always accounted for nothing in my life. I always figured that was the worst fate in the world, to come into it and nobody wants you…that's why I never gave _too_ much thought to actually being a mother, I didn't want that to repeat with my kid."

They sat across from each other at the kitchen table and looked at each other. Almost as if they were looking over at a complete stranger, or as if they were staring at a looking glass and seeing in each other the part of themselves that were missing.

"You know," she finally said, "It's funny. We don't act like we're married, and we haven't done anything that would seem like it, for almost a hundred years, why is that?"

"I guess we never got along too well as married people," Kronos said.

"That's for sure…last time we did anything like a married couple was after the turn of the century, and it's not like we haven't had plenty of chances between then and now," she commented.

That brought Kronos back to something he had thought of the day before.

"Do you remember the last time we were together?" he asked.

She nodded, "I remember…when we were attacked and that bomb went off."

Kronos nodded as he too remembered that horrible night. "Where did you go after that? How did you get away?"

"How did I get away?" she repeated, "Hmm…I don't really recall, I guess fate was just watching over me that night. I ran, as of course I always have, I ran until I was across the Arizona border and into New Mexico and my feet were killing me," she laughed, "Oh but that was a terrible night, I was so scared."

"I know," he replied, "I was too."

Her eyebrows shot up. "You, the end of the world, scared?"

"I told you, I thought you were dead."

"I tell you, sometimes I feel like I am, sometimes I wish I was. It's some life I've lived, just about every day, wondering, am I going to die? Is somebody going to recognize me and I'm going to jail? After a while of it you have to wonder, what kind of life _is_ that? And if I _do_ have this child, what's going to happen then if it all starts again?"

Kronos couldn't answer and he didn't answer, instead he said, "Maybe there's a reason why Immortals don't have children."

Abigail hung her head low as she too considered the thought. "Maybe," she said.

* * *

The day passed with little between the two of them. Abigail complained that the pain in her stomach was getting worse and when that happened she wasn't in the mood for talking much, except cussing Kronos out in such a manner that even he was shocked. Abigail always had a strong voice but not a deep one, and when she called him every obscene name in the book in the same gentle tone he'd always heard her use, it was like he was watching a split personality literally come to life.

She turned around and went to her room as if nothing had happened, as if she didn't even remember what she said to him, and Kronos was left wondering just what all had been done to her during that 'procedure' six months ago. Now, she always had a colorful language when describing him as she saw fit, she was never nice to anybody really, not _too_ nice anyway…and it wasn't as if he wasn't used to such language, he knew every vulgar word in every language that ever existed, and he used them all plenty of times, but Abigail turning around and using them on him, that left him feeling as if somebody had beat him directly on his face, he didn't know what to think of it.

Okay, he decided, so he was going to get his head bitten off, but he followed Abigail to her room. He stopped outside the room and listened at the door. He couldn't hear her but he knew she was in there. Married or not, he still had enough sense to knock before he went in. She didn't answer so he opened the door and, anticipating her to throw her typewriter at his head, stepped into the room.

Abigail was back in bed, her eyes closed but he knew she wasn't asleep, she was just pretending she was so he'd leave her alone. However, even for this century, intelligence was not entirely Kronos' strongpoint. He crossed over to the bed and sat down at the foot of it, careful not to sit on her feet, he'd made that mistake once before and she almost gave him a new scar to match the one he already had.

She opened her eyes the ever so slightest bit, if he hadn't been focusing on her eyes above all else, he wouldn't have noticed it.

"Hi," he said calmly, wondering just what was going to happen now.

"Hi," she replied in a similar, if not tired tone.

"How are you feeling?" he asked.

"I feel like hell," she said.

"Sounds like an improvement," Kronos replied.

She laughed and tried to turn on her side away from him. "Don't make me laugh, I'm already going to the bathroom enough times a day. I don't know what this kid's going to be like when he comes out but he'll make one hell of a roach crusher if he can do to bugs with his feet what he's doing with my bladder."

Kronos laughed and said, "You remember the other night when you asked what Methos was like in the beginning?" She nodded. "Well if you want to know the truth, he was a lot like you."

"Rather like me?" she asked.

"Quite like you," he replied, "Except…"

"Except what?" she tiredly asked.

"He never talked back to me, certainly not like you do," Kronos said.

"Why?" she asked.

Kronos smiled as he recalled being leader over the four of them. In those days, nobody dared say one wrong word to him. How things had indeed changed through time.

"He was scared of me," Kronos said.

"That's another way in how we're _not_ alike, exactly how _are_ we?" Abigail asked.

"I don't know really, all I know is every time I look at you, every time you start talking, every time you get an idea, you just remind me so much of him it's almost as if he'd never left."

Abigail pulled herself onto her knees and looked behind the headboard of the bed.

"What are you doing?" Kronos asked.

She looked back to him and said, "Maybe there's more people sharing this bed at night than we think."

"Are you feeling any better?" Kronos asked.

"A little," she replied as she lay down in the bed again, "But I still wish this pain would stop, it's been going on for six months, it's getting tired."

"Can I bring you anything?"

"No thanks, I just want to stay here for a while and sleep."

She closed her eyes again and Kronos got up to leave. A nauseating feeling washed over him as he looked back at her and realized there were still if everything went accordingly, three more months of this, and what would happen after that…he wasn't sure he wanted to think about that.

* * *

Kronos had decided to get out of Abigail's hair for a while so he left the house and returned about an hour later with a package for her. He went in the front door and up to her room only to find she was nowhere to be found. The bed had been made and he couldn't feel her quickening, and he started to worry. He ran down the back stairs and it was then that the quickening hit him like a bag of bricks, he found Abigail in the kitchen standing over the stove.

"Where have you been?" he asked.

"Down here, where have you been?" she asked.

"I…what are you doing down here?"

"Well I got to thinking, for the six months that I've been carrying this child, I don't want to do anything that'll do it any harm so I've been eating very simple, very bland food so that it shouldn't upset my stomach any further and it'll benefit the child, and it just nauseates me all over again. Now, I'm all for what's good for the baby but I don't believe it's good for the baby if the mother's sick anymore than is necessary. So I decided tonight I'd cook something my stomach's bound to agree with, and even if it doesn't…well it'll be worth standing over the sink for two hours tonight."

Kronos put his package down on the table and looked over into one of the bowls, it was filled with flour and had something in the flour. He didn't know what it was so he picked up one of the pieces, it was cold and wet.

"What is this?" he asked.

"A breast," Abigail replied.

Kronos' eyes went blank and his hands opened like an old hinge and dropped it on the table.

Abigail laughed, "A _chicken_ breast you moron. Fried chicken and fried green tomatoes, corn on the cob and mashed potatoes. After six months of eating like a bird I really don't think that's going to do me, or the kid, too much harm." She looked over and saw the box on the other end of the table. "What's that?" she asked.

"Something for you."

"Well it ain't Pandora's Box, what is it? No wait, don't tell me, something you found along the side of the road, I'm going to open it up and I'm going to find somebody's thumb in it," Abigail said.

Kronos laughed, "No, no this is for after dinner."

Abigail replied, "I've heard of the seven year itch but an 80 year one?"

"Oh come on."

"And just since when do you feel like cozying up to the Hindenburg?" Abigail asked as she patted her protruding stomach.

"Abigail."

"Well let's just see what's in this box," she said as she removed the lid. She lifted out of the box a long white nightgown that leaned toward the thin side of material.

"You're a sick man, you know that?" she asked him.

* * *

That night she tried on the nightgown in the bathroom and wouldn't come out. Kronos had gotten it for her because she didn't like anybody, not even her own husband, looking at her obviously pregnant belly, but now she wouldn't come out even in the gown.

"Come on out of there," Kronos said as he knocked on the door.

"Don't want to," she replied.

"I want to see what you look like," he said.

"You would you pervert!" she called back.

"Abigail," he said, "I have only so much patience, now either you come out here and show me or I'm coming in!"

The knob turned and the door opened, she stepped out in the long white, sleeveless nightgown that went down to near her feet.

"I must look pretty awful," she said.

Kronos didn't agree.

"You look as beautiful now as you did the day we got married."

She nearly fell to the floor from the shock of those words. "When we got married," she told him, "We tread water for eight hours through the flooded streets to get into the next town on a hill so we could be married at dawn. By the time we got to a church, the water had gone up to our armpits, we got into a fight with three coyotes, there were more chunks bitten out of us than there are holes in Swiss cheese, and after being in the water all night my dress was entirely see through except for the mud and my slip was just as bad."

"I know," Kronos replied, "But you were still beautiful."

She shook her head and wandered off to the other side of the room.

"Abigail," he said, "I've been all through this house for the last couple of days, and I just can't help but wonder just _what_ you intend to do when the baby's born."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Well where are you going to put him?" Kronos asked.

"In the bed with me," she said, "If it didn't kill me, it won't hurt my baby either. Of course if I can't have him in the bed, I've prepared for that too."

She went over to the dresser and he followed, she pulled out the top drawer which was a large one and put it on top of the dresser, it had been lined with packing cotton covered with sheets and small pillows.

"That's using your head," Kronos said.

"It's the best I can do for now," she said, "I'm worried that if somebody sees me getting the things I'm going to need when this baby's born…somebody who was there that night that it happened might find out, and then they'd know that the experiment was a success. I left that town, and I never went back, but I can't be sure that somebody didn't follow me. When I wear my coat when I go out and I _always_ wear it when I go out, nobody can tell that I'm pregnant, but…"

He could understand that, he knew, oh how he knew, those people whoever they were seemed like rabbits, or cockroaches, every time you turned around, there were more. It didn't seem to matter where you went, there they were.

Abigail sat down on a chair by the dresser and looked at the floor for a minute.

"Kronos," she said, "I'm worried, and I know I probably shouldn't be…you know they say 99 percent of what you worry about never happens but…I just can't help but wonder…what if they know? What if they're just waiting for the right moment to strike? What if they try to take my baby away from me?"

He'd thought about all of that and plenty more in the time he'd been out there with her.

"I just don't know what I'm going to do if it turns out that they _are_ going to attack again. Any way you look at it, I risk losing the baby," she said.

"I know," he replied.

Abigail clutched her stomach and started moaning as she stood up and moved for the bathroom. Kronos followed behind her and listened to her as she choked in the sink. When it passed, she stood up and said, "Somewhere, some lucky gal is about the kick the footstool out from under her and hang herself."

Kronos grabbed her by the arm and tried pulling her to her feet, but he was surprised to see that that was another thing he couldn't do with her anymore, she was too heavy.

"Come on," he said, "Let's get you to bed."

"Oh no you don't, I'm sick of that bed, I'm surprised I haven't left a permanent crater in it yet," she said.

He tried pulling her up again but this time she stood up herself and knocked Kronos to the floor, and the next thing he knew, she was sitting on his back and giving him another hernia.

"Get off of me," he said.

"Not a chance," she coyly replied.

He tried to crawl out from under her but that was something else she was too heavy for now. They stayed like that for about half an hour, until Kronos finally called uncle and gave up. Abigail got off of Kronos and as he got up, she grabbed the top sheet and her pillow off the bed and headed for the bathroom.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I'm not spending one more night in that damn bed, it's murdering my back," she said.

"Come on," Kronos grabbed her wrist, "You can stay in my room."

He'd slept on both of the beds and knew that the one in his room was closer to being rock hard, which was more than could be said for the one Abigail spent every night on, as soon as any weight was put on that mattress, it seemed to sink about five inches.

After they got in bed, Abigail groaned and put her hands up at her forehead and Kronos could hear her grumbling, "You must be so tired of me already."

"Why do you say that?" he asked.

"It's only been a couple of days and there's still almost three months of this left, we'll be lucky if we both haven't killed each other by that time," she said.

"Don't worry, we'll manage," he told her.

"How can you be sure of that?" she wanted to know.

"If worse comes to worst, we'll force ourselves. Now goodnight."

"Goodnight," she said as she turned on her side.

* * *

Kronos woke up and looked at the clock, 3:14 in the morning. The lights in the room were still on, why that was he couldn't remember, but it gave him a perfect opportunity to look at Abigail as she slept. Sleep seemed to be the only place she could find herself at peace, but that didn't last long for her either. Kronos reached over and placed his hand over her stomach and felt the baby kicking again. Lord, did that kid _ever_ sleep? he wondered.

This was the fifth night that Abigail had spent in his bed with him, and Kronos was starting to wonder. Every day she cussed him out using words that he never even knew she had ever heard, even though she'd always had a sharp tongue on her. And every day after she finished cursing him, she went on about her day as if she never said a word. Being pregnant had turned many women he knew into people he didn't know anymore, but with Abigail it made her completely unrecognizable in comparison to the charming little woman she was during the Old West.

Every time he had to see what had become of Abigail, it just made him want all the more to track down the men responsible for putting her in this predicament and tear their throats open with his bare hands. Now Kronos would be the first to admit that he wasn't the smartest person in the world, but even he knew that Immortals were not a breed of creatures to be handled like lab rats. Every day, Abigail cursed the men who did this to her and what more she cursed the whole ordeal and wished the baby would come out already and though he never said anything, Kronos wanted the same thing for her.

It was then that Kronos realized that the bedroom was unusually warm tonight. The bulbs in the lamps were about burnt out and he knew there was no way in the world they could possibly be making that much heat, so he got out of bed and opened the balcony doors to let the cool night air in. It was then that he wondered why Abigail made this room the guest room when it was much larger, and a hell of a lot more comfortable than her own room.

"Kronos?"

At the quiet utterance of his name, he turned around and saw Abigail sitting up in bed.

"Are you allright?" he asked.

"I'm sorry, Kronos," she said in a tired voice.

"Sorry for what?" he asked as he walked back over to the bed.

"About the way I've been treating you," she said, "I've been downright mean to you, I've been meaner than a damn snake."

"With all due respect, Abigail," Kronos replied as he put his foot up on the end of the bed and looked at her, "You've always been mean to me."

"I know, but most of the time it's stuff I can let slide, but these last few days…you've gone through so much staying here with me and I just treat you like a dog. I feel awful about all the stuff I've been calling you lately."

That surprised Kronos because Abigail never acted as if she could remember saying a single word to him when she had one of her fits.

"I never mean the things I say to you," she said, "And until I've actually said them, I don't even know that I'm thinking them…I just don't know what's come over me."

Kronos had a good idea, it all went back to those men and that experiment…he swore if he ever found them he would tear them limb from limb. He would make them beg for mercy, long before he actually would kill them, he'd make them wish he'd hurry up and get it over with.

"It's allright," he said, "I've been called plenty of things before."

"But not by me, certainly not like I _have_ been going about these last few days."

"That's true," Kronos said.

"I just don't know what to make of it all," she told him, "I remember when we married I promised to be a good wife."

"You also promised that old bird who married us that you'd go to his church every Sunday following the wedding and when he died exactly six days later on the next Saturday, you never set foot in a church again…in fact I wonder if maybe you did something to that buzzard so you never would have to," Kronos said.

She weakly smiled and giggled, "I'm a terrible person, aren't I?"

"The worst," Kronos replied, "And I love you for it."

He knelt down beside her and kissed her four times before pulling away and asking her, "How're you feeling?"

"A little better," she said as she lay back against the pillows.

"Good, think you can go back to sleep?"

Abigail laid down for a second but then threw back the sheets and got to her feet, "Not quite yet," she replied as she headed to the bathroom.

* * *

The next day, Abigail dragged Kronos with her to the market, she took him with her for the company, but he went to keep an eye out. If Abigail was right and the men who attacked her had followed her and were watching from afar, they were going to have one hell of a time getting to her now with him beside her.

He looked around for anybody who might resemble the men he remembered from when the bomb went off, but he saw nothing of the sort. He turned around and saw Abigail stuffing huge pieces of garlic into a bag.

"What's all that for?" he asked.

"I eat it in the morning," she said.

His eyes doubled in size, "You do?"

"Yes."

"No wonder you're throwing up everyday," he told her.

"I only started it a couple of weeks ago," she replied.

Kronos took the bag and poured the large bulbs out and said to her, "If I were you I'd go with the elephant garlic instead."

"I bet you would," Abigail said to him.

Kronos started walking off and stopped dead in his tracks when it came to him that he had just been insulted.

* * *

When they got home, Kronos walked in the door before Abigail and made a beeline for the kitchen. Halfway back to the house, Abigail went into another one of her fits and now Kronos' ears were burning, not so much from what she called him, but after she cussed him out again she shoved two bulbs of garlic in his ears because it was the first thing she could get her hands on, and that was when he took the groceries from her and tried to stay three feet ahead of her.

Now she wasn't coming in and he went to the door to see if she was allright. As soon as he reached the front door, she stepped in carrying one of the wildflowers that was going like crabgrass in her front yard.

"It sure is nice outside today isn't it?" she asked in a tone that was as sickeningly sweet as cane sugar and molasses.

Without waiting for him to answer, she walked over to the kitchen to put the flower in some water.

Kronos didn't know what to make of it, it was as if she had no immediate recollection of the things she said or did, and then days later it came to her like a ton of bricks falling on her head. And with her having no recollection of it, the only thing he could do was stand aside and let whatever was happening with her run its course, and sigh.

"I love being married," he sarcastically said to himself as he wondered just what in hell they were going to do next.


	4. Chapter 4

Two weeks passed and during that time, Abigail had quit throwing up but it didn't do anything to help the pains in her stomach she continued to feel day in and day out. Another upside was that she had calmed down and wasn't swearing at Kronos every day, now it was only every few days, and he took that as a sign that she was getting better.

"It's been about seven months now," she said one night, "Just two more to go."

"How do you feel?" he asked.

She shook her head, "I don't know, I still feel sick…Kronos, I have a question."

"What's that?"

"Well, we both know that there is no way in hell that this baby is going to be as big as my stomach's gotten, the baby will probably at the most be 9 or 10 pounds, so just where in the hell is this other 25 pounds coming in?"

He shook his head, "I don't know."

"I had a horrible nightmare last night," she said, "I dreamt that I went into labor, and my water broke but after a few seconds the water turned to blood, and all my blood was just pouring out of my body…that's not possible is it?"

Kronos didn't answer because he honestly didn't know, he had absolutely no way of knowing just _what_ would happen when she went into labor. He knew of women who bled to death during childbirth but he didn't think any of them were similar to what she just said.

He tried to change the subject. "Where did you say this happened?"

"In Arizona."

"Where in Arizona?"

"Oh it's a little place, you'd never find it," she said.

"Maybe I could," he replied.

"I doubt it," she insisted.

"You don't ever have anything nice to say to me do you?" he asked.

"I have plenty of nice things to say to you," Abigail told him, "I just don't have anything nice to say _about_ you."

He looked at her and laughed. She was the only person in the world who could talk to him as she did and he didn't take offense at it. He put his arms around her and pulled her to him.

"I love you," he said.

"That's your lot in life, I got my own," she replied as she patted her stomach, "I really hope it's a girl…" she poked Kronos in the stomach, "You tell me something, why is it everybody in the whole damn world wants a boy? Why don't they all move to China and then it'll make sense when the majority rules?"

"You've got me," Kronos said.

"Unfortunately I do," she said, "But I'll take you anyway."

* * *

Kronos awoke early the next morning and found the other side of the bed empty. He realized that he couldn't feel Abigail's quickening and he started to worry. He crossed the hall over to Abigail's bedroom and didn't find her there either. Not wanting to consider the worst case scenario just yet, he hurried down the stairs to see if she'd gone outside. He no sooner stepped out the front door when he heard her call to him.

"Morning, Kronos."

He stopped dead in his tracks and found her laying sprawled out on the porch swing.

"What're you doing out here?" he asked.

"I couldn't sleep," she replied, "Thought I'd come out and watch the sun come up."

"You know," he said as he knelt down beside her, "Sometimes you just scare the hell out of me."

"That's fine," she told him, "Sometimes I scare the hell out of myself."

Kronos laughed in an attempt to cover up how worried he'd been, of course she was able to see right through it.

"You know I don't want anything happening to you," he said.

"I know," she replied, "I don't want anything happening to me either. I've had this body for near 1,000 years now, I've grown rather attached to it."

"Do you mind if I sit down?" he asked.

"I don't mind, I just don't think I can get up," she replied.

He grabbed her arms and pulled her up so that she was sitting in the swing instead of laid out on it.

"Well that was fun," she said, "Now I can't wait to get off."

"How're you feeling?" he asked as he sat down beside her.

"Tired," she answered, "And you?"

"I'm fine."

"That's good. I'd hate to think you're wearing down like an old donkey," Abigail said, "Kronos, there's something I've been wondering, and I'm not complaining, but there's something I'd like to know."

"What is it?"

"Why did you marry me?" she asked.

"Because you asked me."

"I mean why me? Why were you interested in me?" she asked, "We kept meeting up over the course of 800 years before we married, why did you keep coming back?"

"I don't follow you, what is it you want to know?" Kronos asked.

"I don't know…I try not to think too much about the past but what I do recall of it…you've always struck me as the sort of guy who would seek a frail woman to dominate over…and you've never been able to do that with me."

"I had a thousand years of it, it gets pretty damn tired," Kronos said.

"Now I don't follow, exactly how does it get tired?" she asked.

"Well…" he wasn't quite sure how to answer, all the things he'd ever been asked in his life, this wasn't one of them. "After a while it lost its appeal…it was the same thing every time, any woman I found, they were either too scared to even try and fight me, or they were resilient at first and I broke them to the point that they wouldn't disobey me…of course, when it was the four of us, we never came across an Immortal woman…until…"

She turned to him, "Until what?"

He shook his head, "It doesn't matter."

"Well just what was so different about me?" she asked.

"Well," he thought, "For one thing you were the first woman I'd seen in over a thousand years."

"What else?" she asked.

He started to laugh, "You just don't give up do you?"

"Nope, I want to know, why were you interested in me?" Abigail asked, "I can understand in the beginning when you found me, but why did you keep coming back?"

"There was something about you," he said.

"What?"

"Well for one thing, you were the first woman I think I'd ever met who wasn't afraid of me."

"Well let's be fair, Kronos, the condition you were in at the time there wasn't much to be scared of," she said.

"I know, but even when you had no idea what you were, you had no idea that you couldn't die, you weren't afraid of what I might do to you, even though you had to have known that you wouldn't have stood a chance against me."

"I knew, I was just waiting," Abigail replied, "Waiting for the moment when you'd decide to kill me. I didn't figure we'd last together as long as we have…but I tell you, these last few months that I've been alone, it's given me a hell of a lot to think about."

"Oh, like what?" Kronos asked.

"I think I know the _real_ reason you kept coming back," she said.

"Oh do you now? What is it?"

She looked him dead in the eyes as she answered, "I think you were afraid."

He laughed, "Me, afraid?"

"That's right," she smugly replied, "Afraid of being alone."

He didn't answer, and what more he turned away from her, which to her was a sign to push forward. "I remember when you first told me about Methos throwing you down in that pit…at the time you struck me as some frightened little kid…afraid of winding up alone again…I think _that_ is why you kept coming back. Your brothers were gone, you tried to take up the old ways again and failed, I was the only person in the whole world you had to come back to because you knew I'd still be there and what more you knew that I'd take you back. That's what it was, isn't it? That's why you're having such a hard time answering, because you're still afraid of winding up alone."

Again he didn't answer, and he wouldn't look at her, but she knew she'd pushed him too far…this she knew from the simple fact that sometime during her explanation, he'd dug the nails of his right hand into his thigh, his fingers had curled and his knuckles were white, and even though he didn't move at all, she could hear his teeth grit together, and she knew she'd struck more than a few nerves.

"You were trying to replace Methos with me, because you knew I wouldn't turn on you," she concluded.

That had been the breaking point in Kronos, and she had known it was, the split second before he let out an animalistic wail that could bust eardrums. She grabbed him and pulled him to her, he buried his face in her shoulder and she listened as the dam burst and out came the grief that had been storing in him for nearly a thousand years. When he seemed to calm down, she looked at him and said, "You know what I think?"

He looked up at her, unable to figure out what she was going to say next.

"I think we're the same person," she told him, "We both hate needing somebody else to look after us, and we'll die before we admit when we need help."

For some reason, that comment made him laugh, but it was short lived as he started crying again, and Abigail thought this too would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

"Now what's wrong?" she asked.

He sighed as he answered, "I don't know."

"Sounds like we're more alike than I thought," she replied, "Don't worry, I'm sure we'll figure something out."

"Just tell me," he said, "How?"

"How what?"

"How did you know?" Kronos asked.

She put her arms around him and kissed him as she answered, "I'm your wife, I'm supposed to know you better than you know yourself, and evidently I do."

As she ran her hands through his short hair, a thought came to his mind and he poked her thigh to get her attention. "Why is it men don't know their wives better than the wives know themselves?"

"Because we already have poor population control in the prisons, you want to fill every mental ward in the world with married men?" she asked.

Kronos laughed for a moment, then he tried to get up but she pulled him back down beside her again.

"Not so fast, we've figured out why you kept coming back, but I still want to know why you married me," Abigail said.

"What?"

"Well I've wondered this for a while, I know I asked you but you didn't have to say yes, so why did you?" she asked, "We could have just kept on as we were and things would've been fine between us…so why did you marry me?"

"Hmmm," Kronos leaned against her shoulder as he tried to think of an answer.

"Do you remember the last time we slept together?" Abigail asked.

"Last night."

"No, the last time we _slept together_ you moron."

"Oh……I'll think of it in a minute…it was April…April of 1912…when we got that hotel room right next to that minister and his wife."

Abigail laughed as she recalled the event, "Oooh their faces were red when they checked out the next day."

Even Kronos with whom subtleness had never been a strongpoint, felt the heat rising in his face as he too recalled that stay.

"That was over 80 years ago, one thing's for sure; no psychiatrist could tie our marriage in with that madonna/whore thing that they've been talking about for some 30 years now I think it is…you know they say every man wants a classy lady in public and a whore in the bedroom…" Abigail about fell over laughing from just thinking about it, "Through our whole marriage, I was never either of those things."

Kronos, who was about sick from laughing so hard, replied, "You never even came close!"

Abigail laughed a couple more times when it hit her what he said, and she hit him in the gut for it.

"I _was_ a lady," she said.

"Sure, but none of the men ever knew it," Kronos replied, "Especially when you started robbing banks…hell, they never caught you because they thought they were chasing a man."

"Yes they did…damn that was fun," she thought, "I sure miss those days."

"Not me," Kronos told her, "I could take only so much rope burn around my neck, Immortal healing or not."

"True," she replied, "That did get a little tiresome after a while."

"Well…I guess I married you because in a sense it's the closest I could come to somebody since my brothers, and I _do_ get quite tired of being alone."

"I can understand that," Abigail said.

She looked up and saw that the sun had risen without either of them realizing it. A new day had begun, and she sincerely hoped it would prove to be a better one than most they had faced thus far.

* * *

The day certainly hadn't gone as planned. Abigail was so tired that as soon as they returned to the second floor, she went straight back to bed. Kronos was beside himself because he didn't know what to do. He had her lay on her back as he leaned over her and set his ear against her stomach, wondering if he might hear something. What he got instead was a pounding in his head as the baby kicked him in the ear.

He doubled back and Abigail laughed and started to lift up her nightgown, "You want to try that again more directly?"

"No way, the way that kid kicks, I'll need the cushioning."

"Kronos," she told him, "I'm worried."

"What about?"

"Well I just wonder, after the baby's born…what happens if something comes up and I have to go to jail? If anybody found out about the baby they'd try to take it away."

"What're you talking about?"

"Well…some of the heists I pulled weren't too long ago, the statute of limitations isn't up on them yet…if anybody were to find out it was me…they'd put me in jail and they'd take the baby away from me…unless you were to disappear with her."

"Abigail."

"What?"

"You're not going to jail, and nobody is going to take the baby away."

"I hope you're right, Kronos, I sincerely hope you're right, but I just don't know," Abigail told him.

"Do you really think I'd let somebody get away with such a thing?" he asked as he lay down beside her.

"Maybe not," she replied, "But whoever did this they sure as hell knew what they were doing and if they could plot it out to this far they can sure enough figure a way to take it away from me after it's born, whether or not you're here."

"That's not going to happen, Abigail," he told her, "I swear."

"I don't want it to," she replied.

"I know," he grabbed her hand in his own, "Why don't you try going to sleep?"

She nodded tiredly, "I love you, Kronos."

"I love you too, dear."

* * *

Oh Lord, Kronos thought as he watched Abigail sleep, he hoped that this whole thing would be over with soon. Two more months to go, maybe, maybe it would only be one month, maybe it would be three. He hated it for her because he knew there was nothing he could do, nothing that could help her.

He leaned over her stomach again and listened, he would almost swear he could hear the kid sighing. Not even born yet and already taking after its mother, he had to laugh. He slipped off the bed and went over to the window. He sincerely hoped that nothing was wrong with the baby or would be wrong with it, but there remained in him a nagging feeling that something _would_ happen, regardless of what they did. It wasn't often in his life that Kronos wanted to be wrong, but now of all times he hoped with everything in him that he was dead wrong.

Hearing a soft groan come from the bed he turned around to see if Abigail was allright. She didn't wake up but rolled back onto her side again, as she had become prone to doing since she became pregnant. Kronos stood at the window watching her, he remembered that night she went on about all the things she hated, and most of those things he hated as well, he hated for her for the simple fact that every day her life was becoming more and more of a living hell and there was nothing he could do about it. Something else he knew, if anything were to happen to that baby, Abigail would probably die alongside it. No Immortal had ever died of a broken heart, but no Immortal had never had to carry a child through pregnancy either.

Being as old as he was, Kronos wasn't exactly sure what he believed in or if he believed in anything at all anymore…but he knew that the laws of nature were not a force to be reckoned with. He knew that was the real reason he worried, no Immortal ever had brought a child into the world, and if it hadn't happened in 6000 years he knew it wasn't meant to happen at all. Of course, he didn't dare tell Abigail that because he also knew that having this baby meant more to her than anything. That was one thing he couldn't tell her no matter what happened, that was the hard part about loving somebody, sometimes the best thing to do wasn't always the honest thing, but in the long run it might prove to hurt less.

Now he knew if he wasn't the only thing she had left, he might be able to tell her what he really thought was the matter. Then if she wanted to hate him for the rest of her life and never speak to him again, he wouldn't care as much because there'd be somebody with her to pick up the pieces. But the truth of the matter was if something went wrong with the baby, he'd be the only person left in her life and somebody would have to catch her when, as the saying went, she got her wings burnt, _if_ it happened. As much as the evidence seemed likely that the baby wouldn't survive, Kronos fought with himself to maintain the shred of hope that stayed in him, that he would be wrong and the baby would be allright.

* * *

Kronos woke up and it wasn't until that point that he realized he'd actually fallen asleep. He turned over and saw once again that Abigail's side of the bed was empty, only this time he saw also that her nightgown had been slung over the bedpost. He started to worry because once again he couldn't feel her quickening. Crossing over to the window, he was relieved to find that she was down in the front yard, and she appeared to be okay, but what the hell she was doing, he was going to find out.

He stormed down the stairs and out the front door and tripped over one of the garbage cans she'd hauled around to the front yard.

"Have a nice trip?" she asked.

"You know, Abigail," he said as he got to his feet, "I have a feeling you're trying to worry me to death."

She giggled, "Don't you just sound cute when you're paranoid?"

"Don't patronize me," he said to her, "What's the idea of sneaking off? You know sometimes you just scare the hell out of me."

"But I'm fine, Kronos…I couldn't sleep and I decided to let you rest while I came out and got some work done."

Kronos was trying to calm down, but if he had a heart, right now it felt to be half between his throat and his mouth.

"You know, Abigail sometimes you just scare the hell out of me."

"I don't mean to, it's your own fault for getting so worked up over everything," she told him.

"_My_ fault?"

"Absolutely, I thought I was worrying too much but you come off as doing far more of it than I ever did," Abigail insisted.

Kronos could see neither one of them was getting anywhere, but he especially was losing this argument because that's exactly how Abigail did things, and he laughed.

"I just don't want to see anything happen to you that's not necessary," he said.

"Well I feel the same way but I'm going to be allright," she replied, "Now, if you want to help me, you can take that garbage can around back to the rest."

Kronos picked up the metal trashcan and immediately dropped it.

"What's in there?" he asked.

"Just some junk I picked up from around the yard," she said.

"You know something," he told her as he picked it up again, "Right about now this trashcan feels about as heavy as you do."

He turned around and Abigail kicked him in the rear to give him a send off on his way.

* * *

The afternoon became unusually warm and Abigail retreated to the bathroom for a cold bath. No sooner had she settled in the tub, there was a knock on the door.

"What do you want?" she asked.

"Can I come in?"

She rolled her eyes, "Do anything you've a mind to, of course being a man that's not much."

The door opened and Kronos slowly stuck his head in, anticipating something being thrown at him. Once he got his head in he opened the door the rest of the way and stepped in.

"How are you feeling?" he asked.

She thought about it for a moment before answering. "I feel allright I suppose…seven months it's been and finally my stomach's quit hurting."

"That's good."

"You know, Kronos, I keep thinking about this baby and what might happen and all…and it just leaves me to wonder about a lot of things."

"Like what?" he asked as he sat on the edge of the tub.

"Like…why is it Immortals _can't_ have children? Is that supposed to be an advantage or a disadvantage for us?"

"I don't know."

"Something else I wonder, how is it decided who comes into this life as an Immortal? Why are there Immortals? For what purpose are we here? Why is it we have no children and also appear to have no family to begin with? Where do we come from if we're not born of mortals, or even Immortals? And why? If everything around us should die and yet we remain, what is the point?" she asked.

These were all questions that Kronos had also thought about and still had no answers for. The game of Immortality was a sick game, played at the expense of lives that never asked to be thrust into the destiny they were. He'd been hearing for a long time about some sort of prize for the last Immortal standing, but he'd lived too long to believe it anymore…there was no prize for taking the heads of others except for small, personal victories. The headhunters were the real fools because they honestly believed what was told to them about a prize at the end of the game.

"I mean it just bothers me, you know?" she asked.

He nodded, "I know, believe me I know, I've thought about it all myself more than once."

"It just gets unnerving after a while…normal people want to know why they're here and where they came from…we ask the same questions but odds are if there exist any answers, ours will be far different from theirs," Abigail said, "And to tell you the truth, the more I think about it all, the more it just scares the hell out of me…the more I have to wonder just what might all happen once my baby's born."

"I know."

"I just think about all the things I've seen and gone through in my life…I try to forget the older things…but this last century alone has been about enough to undo me, or maybe the last century and a half. I have been present to so many disasters that you can't even begin to imagine…thousands of people drowning in one night…people falling 200 feet out of the sky on fire, bomber planes flying into buildings, steamboats exploding with hundreds of people aboard, fires that wiped out whole towns, pandemics that dropped people like flies in the streets of civilization, not some God forsaken third world country but in this upper class nation, hundreds of people dead within an hour from plague…people with their ears and their fingers and their…privates cut off because they owed somebody in a bad pinstripe suit money over a horse race.

"Now…that's all rather tame compared to what went on in our own times but…oh God, Kronos, all that time we spent most of it living in the woods and what we did to people then, wasn't anything compared to what's been going on these last hundred years or so…were you in Germany during the War? I was…I saw those people, in the camps…starved, beaten, raped…and ditches, whole trenches full of rotting corpses that were nothing but a cover of skin on bones to begin with when they died…people can say what they like, we _haven't_ come a long way from that. And even if we were, nature always finds a way to screw things up and sometimes that proves to do more damage to mankind than mankind itself. It about drove me crazy and I've had hundreds of years to get used to whatever fate can throw at me…just what is my child going to see in her lifetime? What if it's even worse than the things _I've_ seen? Lord, my own sanity isn't that good, and this is going to be my child, I wouldn't give much for its chances of being much better off than I am."

Kronos didn't have an answer for the things she wanted to know, and they both knew it. He reached down and pulled the drain plug up and took one of the towels off the rack and helped her up.

"Come on," he said, "Let's get you to bed."

"Again?" she asked, "If this keeps up that's going to be about all I ever do."

"I don't want you overexerting yourself right now."

She laughed as they walked out of the bathroom, "Kronos, _how_ long have you known me?"

Kronos went over to the bedroom window and saw something that he didn't like. Abigail lived alone and she also lived in an abandoned part of town, hers was the only house left standing that wasn't falling apart, and hers was the only yard where the grass wasn't three feet high. And yet he saw a black car parked out in the street, and suddenly a horrible feeling came over him.

He helped Abigail into her house robe which just barely fit her anymore, and settled her down into bed. He told her to go to sleep and that he would be downstairs and out of her hair for a while. She seemed to believe him and with that, Kronos headed downstairs to find out who had come around trespassing. Whoever it was, and he felt he had a good idea of that, when he got his hands on them, they wouldn't live long enough to regret coming out there.


	5. Chapter 5

Kronos collected every card and piece of paper off the dead man to try and figure out who the hell he was and what the hell he was doing out here. When he'd grabbed the man by the throat, he hadn't planned on breaking his neck immediately, but as he knew, the mortal life and its many exits were unpredictable. All he knew thus far was he was another man with the same purple tattoo on his wrist, so, like a bloodhound, he knew he was on the right trail. Unfortunately nothing the man had on him for ID told Kronos anything. It said who the deceased was but that was of no use to him, he threw everything away into the tall grass in the next yard and got up.

When he did, he noticed that there was more than one set of footprints in the dirt by the car, and he started looking around. After he looked around the yard and found nobody, a horrible idea came over him that the second man might've already gotten into the house. He turned to the front door and no sooner had he, he heard something…a sound that he was very familiar with.

"Don't move, or I'll blow your brains out."

Oh if he had a quarter for every time he'd been told that in his life. He turned around and saw another man in black, holding a gun on him. The man was trying very hard not to let on as to how terrified he was, but Kronos could see through the man's act as if it were a see-through nightie. In fact he doubted very much if the man would even have the guts to pull the trigger.

"You take one false move and you're dead," the man told him.

That was a laugh, however before Kronos could even take that one move, he heard a noise that made the blood pound in his ears. It was a shot, but the man hadn't pulled the trigger. However, he did see the man drop the gun and fall onto his knees. It was then that Kronos saw Abigail standing behind him, still in her robe, with a gun in her hands. She fired a second time and the man fell to the ground completely. Before Kronos could say anything, she stepped over the dead man and by him and told him there was a third man coming around from the back.

It was almost an overwhelming desire to outright kill the bastard when he came around, but Kronos wanted answers and damned if he was going to wait for them. He pulled Abigail over to the side and when the man came around, Kronos grabbed him by the neck, making sure to apply less pressure than the last time though. Kronos put the man in a choke hold and Abigail tiptoed around to them to collect the gun out of the man's pocket.

"Allright, now you're going to talk and you're going to tell me what I want to know right now or else you I will make sure lives long enough to regret coming out here," Kronos said to the man as he shook him violently, "Why are you here?"

The man grabbed at Kronos' hands trying to pull them off of his neck, but to no avail.

"Put him down, Kronos, he can't answer when he's turning blue," Abigail told him.

He didn't like the idea of it, but he also knew this man wasn't going anywhere. So he dropped the man on the ground, Abigail came up to him and hit him in the forehead with the muzzle of her gun.

"Now, talk," she said, "And if you don't tell us what we want to know," she opened the chamber of the gun and spun it around to reveal four bullets left, she closed the chamber back into the gun and added, "The next one's going into your forehead."

The man looked from she to Kronos, and back to Abigail again and finally said, "Go ahead and kill me."

She cocked the hammer back but Kronos stepped in at the last moment.

"I'll handle this," he said.

"I wasn't going to kill him," Abigail insisted, "I was just going to make him like an old horse, seven eighths castrated."

"Go in the house," Kronos told her.

She poked him in the stomach with her gun, "Anything you're going to do to him I can sit through if I damn well please and I'm not feeling too shy right now."

Kronos knew he wasn't going to win this argument with her so he grabbed the man by the neck again and demanded some answers. One thing Abigail noted was that the man had come off as plenty brave when he thought he was going to be shot through the head…but with prolonged torture he quickly gave in and started telling them what they wanted to know. He was part of a group of people who watched Immortals and recorded everything about them. There wasn't much more than that to his explanation and it left Abigail uneasy and Kronos was curious. He rolled up the man's jacket sleeve, revealing another purple tattoo.

"Abigail," he said, "Those men that you were talking about, did they have these?"

She looked at the tattoo and nodded, and added, "But he's not one of them, at least I don't think it is…but I could be wrong."

Kronos nodded and tightened his hold on the man's neck and demanded to know if he had anything to do with what happened to her in Arizona. The man denied it but Kronos didn't rightly care because even if he wasn't part of it there, he _was_ part of it now. Through the corner of his eye he looked at Abigail, she knew what he was about to do and suddenly she didn't want to see it.

Abigail's heart went in her throat when she heard the ringing in the man's breast pocket. As if without thinking and just acting on instinct, she went beside her husband and the stranger and held the gun to the man's neck. She warned him to tell whoever was calling that everything was fine, nothing had happened, and they were now in a different location. The man did as he was told, whoever was calling, he told them that they had arrived but nobody was there so they were following a lead that they were heading for the state lines to cross over to California. When he disconnected the phone, Kronos heard the gunshot before he actually saw it. In fact even while watching the man the entire time, he wasn't sure he _ever_ saw the shot that went into the man's neck.

Abigail looked up at Kronos with eyes wide in shock as if she hadn't meant to pull the trigger. He pulled her back to her feet and took her in his arms as she tried to talk but couldn't get any words out, only a bunch of short, small and confusing sounds.

"I thought you'd forgotten how to shoot," Kronos said.

"I never forget," she replied, finding her voice again, "W-what're we going to do with them now?"

Kronos could see she was becoming quite nervous and in all honesty he couldn't blame her. She'd had enough to worry about before this. Finding out that these bastards were everywhere, always watching them…and they both knew though neither would mention it to the other, that if these three men came out now, there would be more to come later.

He looked over to the rest of the land where the grass was over three feet tall. He turned to Abigail and said, "How much rain do you usually get around here?"

"Not enough to flood the place," she replied, "And probably not enough to wash away your DNA either."

"Well then I guess I'm just going to have to improvise," he said, "How far away is the nearest lake?"

"About 14 miles," she answered, "Why? What're you going to do?"

He smiled at her, a very familiar and very old sinister smirk that said he knew something.

"Nothing you need to worry your pretty little head over," he told her.

"Don't patronize me," she said, "I'm not some simpleton who can be content with something like that. What are you going to do, Kronos?"

"I'm going to show our guests out, in the meantime I want you to get back into bed," he told her, "I think you've had enough excitement for one day."

"I…"

He knew by her tone that she was going to say she hated him, so he cut her off before she could by replying, "Love you" and he kissed her.

She weakly smiled and said, "Allright you bastard, but don't you try sneaking off anywhere because if you do I'll track you down."

"Wouldn't dream of it dear," he said.

He bent down and picked up the man's gun and handed it to her, she took it, then went over to the corpse of the man she shot and picked up his gun as well, and headed back into the house.

* * *

It was near dark when Kronos returned. He headed up the stairs and went into the bedroom and saw Abigail laying in bed, but he knew she hadn't been sleeping. Now he was even more worried than he already had been. That afternoon when Abigail came out and shot the man…he hadn't known she was there until after the gun went off, he couldn't feel her quickening as strongly as he had earlier that day.

He became aware of two eyes looking up at him.

"Hi," she tiredly said.

"Hi," he repeated as he sat at the foot of the bed, "Are you allright?"

"As much as I can be right now," she replied, "Where were you for so long?"

"That's a long story and I'd rather not go through it all again," he told her.

"Kronos," she said, "More of those men are going to come, aren't they?"

"Probably."

"We'll have to leave, won't we?"

"Maybe."

"Where do we go now? I don't like the idea of picking up and leaving again, that's what happened when this whole mess started," she said.

"I know," he responded, "We'll think of something."

"What if they come tonight?" she asked.

"I don't think they will," Kronos told her, "For one thing they have no reason to come out here because for another, that man told whoever called that we were heading for the next state and what more he added _they_ were following us out there. So by the time their bodies are found…well we could be long gone before they think to look out here again."

"It just scares me," she said, "What would have happened if you hadn't spotted them first? They might've…they might've…"

"Don't think about it," he told her, "Nothing happened."

"But it could've," she replied.

"But it didn't, and once now becomes the past there's no point in obsessing over it," Kronos said.

"So why can't you forgive Methos for what he did to you?" Abigail asked.

He hadn't expected her to bring that up. He turned away from her and walked over near the windows.

"Did you eat tonight?" he asked.

"Yes and I'm not in the mood for anything more," she replied.

He reached for the light switch and said, "Well then why don't you go to sleep?"

"I don't want to go to sleep, Kronos, I'm scared," she said.

He turned to her and tried to assure her, "You don't have anything to be scared about, I'm going to see to it personally that nothing happens to you."

"But they know, Kronos, they know…oh God, they know, they've known all along where I've been, what's happened…how…how long do you think there have been people doing that? Recording everything, I mean."

"I don't know," he said as he got in beside her.

"Part of the reason I never felt sorry for anything I did was because 100 years later, the two of us would be the only ones to remember…now I find out somebody else has been keeping records on me, probably for most of my life…oh God," she turned on her side and buried her face in her pillow, "I don't know how much more I can stand."

Kronos wouldn't admit it but he had an idea he knew how she felt. He rubbed her back and tried to assure her that nothing further was going to happen, but she didn't believe him.

"You know what I wish?" she said as she turned on her back again, "I wish some big disaster would happen and come straight through here…that's what I want…some big tornado to zip on through here, pick us up and drop us somewhere else…" she turned on her other side and poked his shoulder, "Have you ever been in one of those?"

He shook his head.

"I wonder what it'd be like to be in one, I mean _really_ in one, I mean like the thing picks you up and throws you somewhere else at 300 miles per hour…I wonder if any Immortal ever tried that to see what it was like," she said.

"If they did," Kronos replied, "They probably didn't live to tell about it."

She nodded her head in accepting his comment as a possibility, then she turned back on her side and tried to sleep, but Kronos had a feeling it would be a long and miserable night for both of them.

* * *

Kronos woke up and noticed the lights were still on. He looked at the other side of the bed and saw it was empty. Grabbing the clock on the nightstand he saw it was about 3:30 in the morning. He heard a noise coming from the bathroom and it sounded like Abigail was choking. He had hoped she wasn't sick again but he went anyway to make sure she was allright.

Stopping at the door, he listened and she sounded terrible. He opened the door and stepped in and found her sitting on the floor leaning against the bathtub. She looked terrible and he knew she felt the same way, if not worse. She'd been crying for a while and he had an idea if she didn't calm down soon, she'd start throwing up again, and after almost seven straight months of doing it, that was the last thing either of them wanted. He walked over to her and sat down on the floor beside her, he didn't say anything to her however, he didn't know if there was anything he _could_ say.

After what happened that day, he knew she was worried, what more he knew she had reason to be. He couldn't tell her not to worry and even if he could, she'd see right through it and know that he was worried also. Abigail grabbed him and he about jumped out of his skin. It felt as if she were hanging on for dear life, though he suspected right now she was also struggling to keep hold of her sanity.

Finally she said to him, "I don't care what we have to do…they're _not_ getting my baby, Kronos. I don't care where we have to go…I don't care if they hunt for us the rest of our lives, they're _not_ going to take my baby away from me."

At first, Kronos said nothing and just stroked through her hair as he thought. Finally he said to her, "No, you're right, they're not going to take it away…but we're also not going to be leading them on some wild goose chase halfway around the world either. There can be only so many of those people, then the breed of them has to die out somewhere."

Abigail started crying again and he knew it was more because she was scared than it was that she was upset. He held her a few minutes more before suggesting they get her back into bed.

She declined saying, "I don't want to go back in there, not tonight, I just can't, I don't think I'll ever sleep in that bed again."

He tried reasoning with her, he also tried pulling her up but she wouldn't budge. She was too upset to go anywhere, so Kronos left the bathroom for a moment and returned with a pillow and the top bed cover. When he sat back down he was surprised, and confused when Abigail set her pillow on his lap and laid down to go to sleep. He smiled in spite of himself, and in spite of the situation. For the longest time, Abigail had come off just as strong and just as fearless as he was, but now…now these men had decided to play god in doing something to her that nobody had any right to even think about. They did something to her to impregnate her and it worked, and now there was a child growing inside of her. If either of them would make it, he didn't know. Abigail's quickening seemed to be growing weaker, and he worried that in time her strength would follow that.

* * *

The next day they discussed where they would go if they had to leave, Kronos talked about it in a manner that didn't sound quite so serious. But Abigail had been giving it some serious thought.

"We should probably go," she said, "Somewhere far from here so they can't catch up with us immediately…someplace that if we were to switch from one plane to the next or something like that…maybe that would work…someplace far away…it's to my understanding that Australia is a nice place to visit this time of the year."

"Australia?" Kronos repeated, and he considered it for a moment, "Might be good."

"Might be, but I can't fly because I'd get sick again," Abigail said, "If we hopped a boat heading there I'd probably get sick still…and then once we get there…" she laughed, "Something my size on the beach, you wait, I'd be harpooned."

Kronos laughed as he sat down beside her on the bed, but she wasn't laughing, she had something else on her mind.

"Kronos," she said as she looked to him, "How long will it take for those men to be found?"

He thought about it for a moment. "Maybe a day, maybe a week…by the time they find that car, the fish will probably have made one big meal of them."

"You just think of everything, don't you, you bastard?" she asked.

"I try."

"Well, I hope you know just how in hell we're going to get out of here if they plan to ambush us," she said, "They're mortals, we'd never know they were coming until it was probably too late."

"Could be," he replied, but Abigail knew he wasn't taking it seriously.

"Kronos, let's face facts, we don't rightly know _what_ we're going up against here," she said.

"What we're going up against is nothing more than a bunch of sad little men who think they know more than we do."

"Well they bloody well must because those sad little men put a baby in me, and I don't know whose it is, or what's going to happen to it. Only _they_ know that."

Suddenly Kronos became very serious.

"I know, dear, I know…everyday I look at what they did to you and I want to kill them…I want to castrate them with my bare hands, I want to rip their throats out…I want to have them _begging_ me to kill them."

"You think I haven't felt the exact same way every day of my life since it happened?" Abigail replied, "I want to ram my hand into their chests and pull out everything that's inside of them while they watch. I want so much to kill them for what they did to me…I want…I want…"

She couldn't finish that thought. She keeled over and almost fell to the floor, but Kronos caught her and pulled her back up. Abigail let out a wail that about burst Kronos' eardrums and for a minute he couldn't hear anything but a ringing in his head. The next few hours of that day were passed with Abigail crying worse than she had since Kronos found her the month before, and Kronos holding onto her worrying for the sake of all three of them. He was scared for Abigail for most of the same reasons she herself was afraid, and he didn't want anything to happen to the baby, even though right now that seemed to be the cause of all this trouble they'd gone through. He honestly didn't know what he would do if something happened to the baby when or after it was born, and he also didn't know what would happen to Abigail if it did.

* * *

Kronos counted the following days as they passed oh so slowly. Every day it was about the same thing. Abigail became sick again, though thankfully not every day, she did however swear at him on a daily basis and sometimes several times a day, only to go on as if nothing happened. She lived the following days in fear that either more of those men, or the police would come for her. Kronos couldn't convince her of otherwise, partly because he himself wasn't so sure whether or not anybody would come for them. Any other time, under any other circumstances, it wouldn't matter so much. If anybody came for them, they could take them, what more they could run, if they got shot it wouldn't matter…but now, Abigail was nearing eight months pregnant, and if anything happened to her, she would survive but the baby might not and that wasn't a risk they wanted to take.

Some nights neither of them slept because Abigail kept Kronos up discussing if things had gone differently, or if they'd had their lives to live over again, what would be different? She also brought up the possibility if reincarnation might really exist, and if it did she hoped when her time came that her next life wasn't as painful a one as this one had been to her.

On one of those nights, Kronos asked her if she thought they might meet up again in another life. Abigail said she didn't know, but she had a good idea _if_ they were reincarnated, one of them would come back as a horse, and the other would follow as the horsefly. She didn't say who but Kronos had a good idea as to which one of them would come back as the fly.

On other nights, when Abigail actually did sleep, Kronos spent the night pacing the bedroom floor, occasionally looking out the window, and wondering if Abigail's paranoia was rubbing off on him. He couldn't sleep because he was worried for Abigail and the baby. He also wondered if he might be losing his mind because in all his life he never once lost sleep over anything at all before this.

Oh but these last few weeks had given him plenty to think about. And as he wore a hole in the floor on this night, something came to mind. On the surface of it all, Abigail had been a good wife, maybe particularly because they hadn't seen that much of each other through the marriage. But through it all she had been a good wife, even before she became one…she argued with him constantly but he had expected that. She never asked for anything except that he stick around for a while.

So what did it matter that if for every time she'd committed a crime it was marked down that there'd be a record of 50,000 dashes somewhere? He didn't care, she was his wife and she was the only person who could see through him, and see in him the only real crime he committed, or rather what he considered to be his only real crime. Using her as a substitute for Methos in ensuring that he wouldn't have to be alone, something he'd never forgive himself for even if he wouldn't admit to it. It was something he hadn't expected her to forgive him for either, and yet it seemed she had. Maybe she was right and they were both the same person and that's why she was able to see through him so well.

He heard the clock strike the hour and suddenly he had to sit down. It would still be hours before morning, and already he knew he wouldn't get any sleep tonight, he had too much on his mind. Looking over to the bed, he saw Abigail asleep. Anymore she didn't even seem to sleep in anything resembling peace, she looked as worn out and anxious in her sleep as she did during the whole day. Every day he fought a war with himself, one that neither side won. One part of him wanted the whole pregnancy to be over with immediately, and the other part of him worried about what would happen once the child was actually born. If it came too soon, it might not survive, but he honestly didn't know for how much longer he and Abigail could wait.

Getting back on his feet, he went back over to the bed and climbed in beside Abigail. He reached over and felt her stomach again, and without fail the baby kicked. Kronos was starting to seriously give it some thought as to whether or not the baby even slept. Or maybe it was just an insomniac like he himself had become recently. That thought brought him back to one of his and Abigail's initial questions, just whose child was it? They both decided it didn't matter but he knew that was a lie. It mattered very much just where that baby came from that they put in her…it boiled Kronos' blood to think that one of those men was responsible for not only putting it in her but creating it in the first place.

While he knew that they had to have taken a highly scientific approach to whatever procedure they had, all he could think about was that it was no different than had they tied her down and let one of the bastards have at her. There was no difference in the world between the two trains of thought, they kidnapped her, knocked her unconscious, strapped her down, took away her clothes, invaded her body relentlessly and for their own sick pleasure to gain from it all. What made it worse was the simple fact that they'd probably never find the men responsible for it. They seemed to be just a few in a large group of damned voyeurs…only it wasn't as simple as that. From what he gathered from that man that Abigail shot, their purpose was only supposed to be to document the Immortals' lives, not try and interrupt them.

His head was pounding again and he wasn't sure what that was from. Something else he'd noticed over the last few days, Abigail's quickening seemed to be getting weaker and weaker. He didn't bring it up with her however because she could still sense his presence perfectly, and he wasn't sure what to make of that. All that he did know was that with every passing day, Abigail's predicament scared the hell out of him even more than the day before and he didn't think that was possible.

As he looked up, he saw Abigail was awake, or partly awake anyway, and she was looking at him.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

It was all he could do to lie through his teeth and answer, "Nothing, go back to sleep."

Abigail grumbled as she closed her eyes and lay back against the pillows. Now Kronos was feeling sick himself. There was a sudden gnawing feeling eat away at his stomach, and he knew that no matter _what_ happened from here on out, things were only going to get worse. He looked to the calendar on the wall and he knew it would not be much longer before Abigail finally went into labor, and when that day finally came…it wasn't a thought he wanted to carry all the way to its end, somehow he just knew something would go wrong.

"Kronos…"

He looked up at his wife, who still appeared to be in a dead sleep, but he knew better.

"I told you to go back to sleep," he said.

"I was just thinking," she said, "About what I should name the baby."

"What've you come up with?" he asked.

"I still don't know," she replied, "I think I better wait until after its born and I actually get to see it, before I decide." She opened her eyes the slightest bit and looked at him, "What do you think?"

She didn't want to know what he thought, so instead he smiled and told her it sounded like a good idea. Abigail went back to sleep, and Kronos, who hadn't had any beliefs in any deity whatsoever since before he became an Immortal some 4000 years ago, started praying hard and heavy for some miracle that she and the baby would be allright when the birth occurred.


	6. Chapter 6

Kronos awoke when a loud clap of thunder exploded in the sky. He felt his heart beating against his throat and he looked over to the clock, five in the morning. Turning on his side again he tried to go back to sleep, he tossed and turned for a few minutes and realized that he wasn't going to be able to get back to sleep. The gnawing at his stomach that had been building up over the past few weeks was sitting in his stomach like a hundred pound rock. Looking over to the calendar, he saw the reason why; it was nine months to the day since Abigail had been impregnated. Somehow he just _knew_ that today would be the day that she had the baby, and it scared him to death.

He looked over at his wife who still lay on her side asleep. For the first time in a long time she finally looked relaxed, genuinely relaxed, for which he was most grateful. She had been in so much pain over the last few months, and now it all came boiling down to this day, Kronos knew. Today would determine just what would happen to the baby, if it would live, if it would die, if more of those bastards would come for them.

There was another crash of thunder and Kronos went to the window to see what was going on. He opened the window and rain came pouring in on him. Looking out he saw that the sky was filled with dark clouds, so much so that it didn't anymore look to be morning than anything. It was so dark outside it looked like the world was stuck at midnight. Kronos closed the window and headed back to the bed. He hadn't told Abigail but he hadn't been staying with her the whole time these past three months. His own home was not too far off and occasionally he would sneak out of the house and back there for something, and then come back before Abigail would notice he was gone. But he knew that today he wasn't leaving her alone for anything.

Abigail turned on her back, she opened her eyes and looked at him.

"How are you feeling?" he asked.

"Allright I guess," she answered tiredly, "How're you?"

"I'm fine."

"Good," Abigail closed her eyes again, "What time is it?"

"Just after five."

"Fine," she turned back onto her side, "Wake me up when it's time to eat."

"Abigail, are you sure you're okay?" he asked.

She nodded, "I'm fine, Kronos."

"Thank God."

* * *

Abigail woke up after eight and dressed and joined Kronos in the kitchen for breakfast. Neither said anything, but Abigail seemed to be perfectly optimistic about the day whereas Kronos tried act the same way but he was a nervous wreck. Every minute he worried that she might go into labor but thus far she seemed to be holding up very well.

After breakfast, Abigail went back upstairs, and she was up there for a while. Kronos got worried and headed up to see what was going on. He found her in her bedroom pulling a bunch of old ivory sheets out of a drawer.

"What're you doing?" he asked.

"Well I got to thinking," she said, "When I go into labor, we can't go to a hospital, so if I have it here in bed…that could get messy and I don't think by then I'll be in any mood to change sheets. So I've been using this old set from time to time for drop cloths, I figured I'll put them down on top of the others and that way any mess that is made can be easily taken care of."

"How're you feeling?" he asked.

"I'm fine, Kronos, why do you keep asking that?" she wanted to know.

"Honestly? I'm scared."

"Scared?"

"Yes…maybe I shouldn't be but I can't help but obsess over the fact that you are to this day nine months pregnant…you could go into labor at any time and that scares the hell out of me because I don't know what's going to happen," Kronos explained.

"Well I can understand that," Abigail replied, "I'm scared to death that something's going to happen. And it's _my_ body, I should know when something happens but I don't know if I will."

They looked at each other for a minute and laughed at it all.

"I guess we're about evenly matched," Kronos said.

She nodded as she unfolded a large sheet and started setting it down on the bed.

"Is there anything you need?" he asked.

"Yeah, how about bringing me up a drink?" she asked, "I feel like I haven't had water for a week now."

Kronos turned and was out the door and down the stairs. Abigail finished spreading the main sheet out over the bed and went to grab another when she felt another pain in her groin and stopped. The pain seemed to stir in her body, directly under her stomach…and then much to her shock, she felt a dripping sensation coming down her leg. Surely she couldn't have…no, no, her water had to be breaking, that was it. She looked down and her eyes went wide with panic.

"Kronos," she said in a voice almost completely drowned out by fear, she called again, a bit louder, "Kronos…" but still not loud enough to be heard. It wasn't until she felt the dam in her burst and the stuff was running clear down her legs that she finally managed to get her voice loud enough to be heard.

"KRONOS!"

Kronos had already been on his way up the stairs, but when he heard Abigail scream, he ran up the rest of the way and found her in the doorway to the bedroom. She was practically on her knees and it was much to his horror that he found her kneeling in a puddle of her own blood. It was the darkest red he'd ever seen the blood of any living creature in his entire life. And it was at that moment that he recalled Abigail mentioning this scene right out of a nightmare she had had, but this was no nightmare, this was really happening.

He grabbed her up and moved her over to the bed, he laid her down and while she lay there in hysterics screaming, he removed her maternity sized overalls and her underwear and covered her torso with one of the pillow sheets.

"Kronos, what's going on?" she asked, "What's happening? This isn't how it's supposed to be is it?"

He honestly couldn't answer her, and he told her as much, because he honestly didn't know what was supposed to happen when an Immortal went into delivery. He got a good look at her and through all the blood he told her, though not in so many words, that she was dilating at an extremely frightening speed. At the rate she was going at, the baby should be out in no time.

"Oh my Lord," she said, "Kronos, I'm scared, I mean I'm really…" she wasn't able to finish what she had to say, she started screaming louder than Kronos had ever heard. And knowing how much pain she had been in prior to this, Kronos could only imagine the intensity of the pain occurring within her body now.

The next half hour passed like a nightmare. Abigail laying in bed bleeding and screaming and Kronos worried out of his mind. He was worried that something more would happen to her, he worried that this would be it and he also worried that something worse might happen to follow this.

Finally it came about that he had to tell her that the baby was going to be out soon, and Abigail had to know if it was coming out head or feet first. Kronos told her that he saw a head pushing through, and that was about all he told her. It would've been about all he could say at that time and be heard because the storm that had woken him up five hours ago had returned and now was even louder than before. He could almost swear that the house actually shook every time the thunder crashed.

"Allright listen, Kronos," Abigail said over the storm as she felt the baby pushing at her again to get out, "No matter what happens, I love you."

"What?" Kronos couldn't hear her over the storm.

"I SAID I LOVE YOU, YOU BASTARD NOW SHUT UP!" she replied.

The house shook again and Abigail felt the baby again.

"Allright, I think this is it," she said to him.

Kronos picked up one of the pillow sheets to wrap the baby in when it came out, and the truth was that he almost didn't catch it in time because no sooner had Abigail said that, the baby pushed completely out of her body. Kronos was the first one to get a look at it, and his face had turned to a mask of horror. Abigail couldn't see it but she knew he wasn't saying anything for a reason, and nine months' worth of fear built up inside of her and came crashing down at that point.

"WHAT IS IT?" she demanded to know, "WHAT'S WRONG WITH MY BABY?"

* * *

3 days later—

It was early in the morning. The sun was just coming up and the grass was covered in dew. For a change, there wasn't a single cloud in the sky and it looked to be fair weather all morning. Kronos saw all this through the eyes of a man who felt as if he hadn't slept and would never sleep again. He didn't get much sleep anymore truth be known. He was just coming from his house and heading back to Abigail's, he had left the house while Abigail slept. It made it a lot easier that way, he felt, to go to the grave.

He would never tell Abigail where he buried their daughter, if she had to go and see it for herself, that would just hurt her even more than she already had been, and right now Kronos wasn't sure that was possible. The memories of the last three days came crashing down on him as if they had never ended. He remembered above all else, Abigail crying, for three days the only time when she didn't was when she was in too dead a sleep from exhaustion. The one that hurt most to remember was from the day it happened, right after she had found out…she lay in bed soaked in her own blood and crying, "My baby, my poor baby, dead, before I could name her…" and then her voice became a bitter scream that could've shattered the windows, "those _BASTARDS!_ They killed her before I could even _see_ her!"

There was no doubt of that, in her mind or Kronos'. Those men, whoever they were, whatever they were…when they made that baby they sure as hell knew what they were doing. Never in all of his life had he ever seen a child born dead and born with no umbilical cord. Abigail had screamed it at him but he knew far too well that that child hadn't died until the moment it came out of her…and he knew if Abigail were mortal and this had been a normal pregnancy, maybe something of that sort could be expected, that was the chance taken…but no, Abigail was Immortal and that child was put in her by a bunch of egotistical bastards who thought they could play the role of a god, and when they did put it in her, they saw to it that she would never have any chance to keep it.

Kronos about broke his teeth from pressing them against each other to keep from screaming. He wasn't too far away that Abigail might not hear him and that was the last thing he needed, her running out looking for him, still in a daze. Lord, he remembered how she was the morning after the birth. He'd gone outside to look at the damage done by the storm and she had come out in her nightgown with nothing on underneath it, blood still running down her legs though not nearly as much as when she went into delivery.

"_What are you doing out here?"_ he asked.

"_I can't stay in there,"_ she replied as she staggered down off the porch, _"I've got to get out of here."_

"_Oh no you don't,"_ Kronos grabbed her from behind and tried to pull her back inside, _"Abigail, you're not of your right mind now, you're likely to go out and kill somebody right now."_

"_Good, that's what I want, that's exactly what I want,"_ she replied,_ "I __want__ to kill somebody, and I want to go to prison for the rest of my life or longer. They might as well lock me up now because I've got NO reason to stay out now. I WANT those bastards dead and I want to be the one to do it myself!"_

He dragged her back into the house, her kicking and screaming at him all the way like a woman possessed. He pulled her upstairs and she screamed and cried as if she were about to be sacrificed instead of her husband worrying for her sanity.

Kronos also remembered that same day of the birth, a few hours after it had happened. The storm had ended and the sun came back out and shone in through the windows. Abigail had forced herself out of bed and she took the child wrapped in the pillow sheet and placed it in the bed she'd prepared for it in the dresser drawer. Then Abigail fell to the floor and cried harder than she ever had in her life, and that went on continuously for the next three days.

As Kronos walked back home he realized he was nearing the end of his rope. He didn't know what he was going to do with Abigail today. Since the birth, he couldn't get her to eat anything, half the time she said she wasn't hungry, and the rest of the time she said just the idea of it nauseated her. She'd spent most of those days either in bed, or asleep on the floor when she couldn't stand being in bed any longer.

Only now, Kronos knew, there was something else he had to tell Abigail about and he honestly didn't know how she might handle that either. As he neared the house, he felt a quickening and looked up, and he was surprised. Abigail was sitting out on the porch swing, dressed for the first time in three days, though she still must've been out of it because she wore a blouse that was open halfway and a pair of shorts that didn't look to be much longer than her underwear. As Kronos walked up the steps he also noticed that she'd bathed that morning.

"Well Abigail," he said as he sat down beside her, "I see you're out of bed, are you feeling any better?"

She didn't answer him for a minute and she didn't even look at him. Finally, when Kronos was ready to give up, she answered, but not to the question he asked.

"I wanted that baby, Kronos," she said.

"I know."

"I should never have had it in the first place," she added, "You know that. You said yourself that it could never happen."

"I know."

"They had no right to put that baby in me, Kronos," Abigail further added, "But they had even _less_ of a right to make sure that it would die before I could even see it."

"I know," he repeated, "I'm sorry there's nothing else I could say to you to make you feel any better."

She laughed bitterly and said, "I'll be allright…eventually…I know I've been scaring the hell out of you these last few days. You know as terrible as it is to say, I think you deserved some of it though."

Abigail started crying again, Kronos pulled her to him and told her again how sorry he was for her about the baby. She pushed away from him and tried to pull herself together again.

"So…what did you find out about the blood test?" she asked.

A short while after the baby had been born, Kronos walked out of the room and back over the puddle of blood where he'd originally found Abigail. The blood was still wet and it looked a different shade of red than it had when he first came up. He started wondering, and he didn't really know why, but he collected samples of the blood from different places to test them later to find out what type it was.

He'd taken the samples back to his house and looked them over, that was all in the same day, but he hadn't gotten back with the results until just now. Kronos looked at her and asked her, "What blood type are you?"

She looked at him and shrugged her shoulders, "I don't know, I wasn't aware that I had one, we never stay open long enough to find out it seems."

"This isn't going to be easy to explain," Kronos said, "From what I can gather, none of the blood came from the baby, but none of it matches either."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I mean that people have the same blood type as their fathers, one blood type, from you however I found in that blood, four different types," Kronos explained.

"How's that possible?" Abigail asked.

"I wish I knew, believe me I sincerely wish I knew, I can't figure it out, and I can't help but wonder _what_ they did to you that that would happen," Kronos said.

Abigail nodded. They were both lost as to how and why this all had happened.

She shook her head and said, "It's been a bad year."

"A horrible year," Kronos replied, "And I don't know where we go to from here."

They sat in silence for a moment before Abigail stood up, or tried to, and almost fell down. Not having eaten anything in three days was beginning to take its toll on her. Kronos took her inside and sat her down at the kitchen table. He wasn't able to get her to eat much but it was an improvement over the past few days when she hadn't touched anything. After that she seemed out of it again so he took her upstairs but when he headed for her bedroom, she tried to pull away from him.

"I can't go back in there," she said, "I can't sleep in that bed again, not after what happened in there."

"You'll get a new bed," Kronos replied, "In the meantime I'll move you down to my room. The view's better anyway."

Before Abigail could respond, Kronos picked her up and carried her down the hall to the guest room.

"Very funny," she dryly said.

Kronos carried her into the room and in a most unceremonious manner, dropped her in the middle of the bed.

"I hate you," she told him.

Kronos laughed, "I'm glad you're feeling better."

"Yeah, some…" Abigail replied as Kronos drew the sheets up on her, "Kronos."

"What?"

"In…a couple of days when I'm more up to it, I'll go with you to Arizona, and show you where it happened," she said.

Kronos didn't say anything but a slight smirk formed on his face. He had hoped that they would go back to the scene of the crime to figure out where this whole mess had started.

* * *

Over the next few days, Kronos paid about as close attention to Abigail as he ever had. He made sure she ate and she got plenty of rest, and she didn't do too much more than that for the next couple of days. One morning he woke up early and found she was gone, he searched the entire house and the whole property but couldn't find her. However he wasn't about to panic just yet, he had an idea as to where she might have gone.

Following his hunch, he found her at the cemetery, looking through all the tombstones. As it occurred to him what she was doing, he felt a ripping sensation in his chest. In all the years he'd heart people use the expression of their heart breaking, he had always figured it was some dumb expression some fool had made up only to be used by fools, but now as he saw his wife looking for the grave of their infant daughter, he knew it was as real as himself.

"She's not there, Abigail," he said, "You won't find her here."

She turned and saw him, and she asked him, "Will you take me where she is?"

That was the one thing he couldn't do, no matter how much it might hurt her. He shook his head sadly and replied, "I'm sorry."

Abigail looked as if someone had torn the heart out of her chest and she turned away.

"I just feel like an old fool," she said, "A damn fool…I thought I could keep the baby…"

"Abigail, you had no way of knowing what would happen," Kronos told her.

"But I knew it could never happen, it wasn't meant to be…it's my own fault…_why_ did I think that the baby was going to be allright? It was created in a test tube in some laboratory, of _course_ it wouldn't be allright!" she cried.

Kronos grabbed her incase she fell, but instead she seemed to recollect herself.

"You know," she said, "I've met a lot of people who have had so many things wrong with them…and they always said if they could live forever then everything would be perfect." She shook her head, "Immortality is nothing to look forward to, no, death is something to look forward to when nothing more can touch you and you quit hurting altogether."

"Don't talk like that," Kronos said.

After he got her to calm down, he took her back to the house and laid her down to rest. But instead of going to sleep, she got up just as soon as he left the room, reached under the bed and pulled out a suitcase and started throwing everything from the drawers into it. Kronos returned a few minutes after, finding her doing just that, and he asked her what she was doing.

"There's noting here worth us waiting around for," she answered, "We might as well head on out to Arizona, I'll pack."

"There's no rush if you're not up to it yet," Kronos told her.

"I have to go," she said, "I have to, I can't stand being around here anymore, there's no reason for me to stay. We have to go, we have to find the answers to it all. Who are those men? What did they want with me? Why did they put a baby inside of me that died the minute it left my body? Why when my water broke was I kneeling in four different types of blood that came out of my own body? What do they want with me? With us? Why, if they're only supposed to watch and record what we do, did they have to go and do to me what they did? That's what I want to know, WHY?"

Kronos came up on her from behind and grabbed her, she tried to turn around but they both lost their footing and fell onto the bed. They clung to each other and cried for the mess that their lives had become in such a short amount of time. After what seemed like an eternity, they both wore themselves out and fell asleep and stayed like that for the rest of the day and the night.

The next day they set out for Arizona, to try and find some answers as to just what in the hell was going on.

* * *

Kronos followed Abigail down the small alley in the almost impossible to find, Arizonian town she said she'd been in when the initial attack happened.

"I don't know what you expect to find here though," she said, "Any evidence that might have been here would be long gone by now, it was over nine months ago."

"I'm not looking _for_ anything," Kronos replied, "I'm thinking."

"Uh-oh," Abigail said, "What about?"

He turned to her and said, "If those same men were to come through here again, and you saw them, you'd be able to identify them, wouldn't you?"

"Well I wouldn't know any of their names, but I think I'd recognize their faces, why? What's going through that thick skull of yours?" she asked.

"For one thing, it's a very well known fact that mortals aren't too bright," Kronos said.

"This is true, what else?"

"This particular bunch of them, they're probably the dumbest that ever lived," Kronos added.

Abigail sneered, "If they're so stupid, how have they lasted _this_ long?"

"I'm thinking, they're bound to either make the same mistakes they did before, or if they don't, they'll trip over the ones they made originally, and when they do, I'm going to be here waiting for it to happen," Kronos said.

"I don't think I follow you," Abigail told him, "You mean stake out the alley and wait for a bunch of guys who might never show up?"

"Not quite," he replied, "You see, this is too large of an attack to be something new…they've had to have been around for quite a while now, and that said they wouldn't be limited to just a few places…they're probably all over, every town, every country, everywhere…it's just a matter of how long before we run into them."

"That shouldn't be too hard," Abigail said, "This is Arizona, it's going to be 90 degrees this week and we've got to look for guys in black coats to cover those tattoos."

"Exactly," Kronos said, "It shouldn't be too long before we find them."

"But the question is once we _do_ find them," Abigail responded, "_What_ are we going to do with them?"

* * *

A few weeks passed and it all seemed to be with no luck. No matter where they went, they didn't seem to find anybody who could match what they were looking for. Nobody with strange tattoos on their wrists and also nobody in long coats and dark glasses either. Abigail was starting to wonder if maybe they were just chasing their tails and it would be better if they went back to New Mexico. Or rather that's what she thought until one night when she couldn't sleep and she found Kronos' side of the bed to be empty.

She went down to the kitchen and saw him at the table, he was doing something but she couldn't quite make out what it was. Finally she asked him, "What're you doing?"

He looked up at her and said, "Come and see for yourself," as he returned his attention to his right wrist.

Abigail sat down beside him at the table and saw him messing with a purple liquid in a bowl. She dipped her finger in it and tasted the stuff only to spit it out at the wall.

"That's terrible," she said.

"It's dye," Kronos replied.

"What're you doing?" she repeated.

Then she saw exactly what he was doing. He was putting the dye on his wrist so that it matched the tattoo that the other men wore.

"What in the hell are you doing?" she asked.

"I have an idea," he answered.

"Oh Lord," Abigail groaned, "What is it now?"

"Well it might not work but I've got an idea that if we're going to find these bastards, maybe one of us should look the part, it's a very common mistake people make. If a Jew were to put on a brown suit with a swastika during the War, then the Nazi would let his guard down and become an easy target. If those sons of bitches see this," he pointed to the faulty tattoo, "They're going to slip and they're going to say something they shouldn't, and then we'll be onto something."

"I think you already _are_ on something," Abigail said, "Have you been drinking the cooking sherry again?"

"Well I said it may not work but there's a chance it could. They know what not to look for but they also know if they see someone else with this thing on their wrist, then they're an ally, or so they think."

"You think you might find the same men that jumped me that way?" Abigail asked.

"It's worth a try, isn't it?"

"I suppose so," she said, "I'm going back to bed."

Kronos watched Abigail rise from the table. Those bastards, whoever they were, sure enough knew what they were doing in marking her. Even now a slight bulge remained in her stomach and there was nothing that could get rid of it. He remembered at six months along, she had commented of weighing nearly 200 pounds, and whatever was still inside of her even now that she had lost the baby, it kept her past the weight and build she had been for her entire life prior to it. As horrible as the idea was, he wondered if someone were to surgically open her stomach and look inside, just _what_ would be found that it kept her as she was. Every day when she had to get up and look herself over she would have another reminder as to what she had and lost.

Every day that he had to see what had become of her, and every time he had to remember what had been taken from the both of them, it made his blood boil and he wanted all the more to track down the men responsible and torture them in ways that were beyond anything they could imagine. He wanted to make them suffer for what they had done, and as soon as he _did_ find them, he would make sure they did suffer, long and without mercy, before they finally died, and he would see to it personally that they _did_ die.


	7. Chapter 7

"Watchers," Abigail said one night after Kronos returned home, and with plenty to tell her about the men, "They don't strike me as the type to just watch, it seems to me they do a good deal of hunting as well."

Kronos nodded in agreement. His trick had worked. When the other men saw the tattoo on his wrist, they made the mistake in actually believing he was one of them. He had found out that almost every Immortal had a Watcher assigned to keeping an eye on them, apparently he had slipped through the cracks somewhere along the way.

"But I still don't understand," Abigail said, "What do they want with us?"

"Damnedest thing," Kronos replied, "They say their job is to record everything Immortals do so when they're all dead, their history will survive."

"What's the point in that going to be if we're all dead?" Abigail asked, "For that matter, just what in the hell does that have to do with what they did to me?"

"Exactly what I've been trying to figure out," Kronos told her, "From what I've seen of it thus far, I think that record and document bit is all a cover for what they really do…there seem to be a lot of demented bastards in this profession."

"But have you found the ones who attacked me?" Abigail asked.

"No, but I did find some records they left behind…it explains a good deal of that, and after reading through them I can honestly say that these men aren't just bastards, they're not just demented, what they are I don't think there even exists a name in the world."

Abigail's eyes widened when she heard that.

"Well did it say _why_ they did it?" she asked.

"No, the records I found mostly explain _how_ was all done. As you said, that child was created in a test tube, but it involved the sperm and egg which were volunteered up by two other Watchers."

"What? You mean there are women in this racket too?"

"Quite a few of them…that child that grew inside of you went into you already having some genetic work done to it. I checked, both donors came from a family history of stillbirths, miscarriages, and the sort. However they didn't want to take any chances so they added something to the experiment, something that as soon as you went into labor, ate away at the umbilical cord until there was nothing of it left when the baby came out."

Abigail shook her head as she listened, "That's terrible…but what about the blood? Where did all that blood come from?"

"Amazing things they come up with in scientific mutation, apparently they'd been working on some sort of counteractive leech."

"What?" Abigail asked.

"Well you know how leeches do, they grab hold and bleed you dry."

"Yeah, just like lawyers," Abigail said.

"Apparently they'd worked on something else, they created this thing that also went in with the baby, it started as microscopic bacteria but grew into creatures like leeches only instead of draining blood, they went in with the four types already imbedded in them, and they swelled up, making more of the blood, until they just burst," Kronos said.

Abigail's eyes widened in horror as he said that, and immediately her hands went to her stomach, "I'll bet that's why after the baby came out, my stomach didn't go back to its regular size."

"Could be," Kronos said, "I found a lot of the how, just none of the why."

They hung their heads low and sat in silence for a moment before Abigail spoke up, "I'll bet I know why they did everything to me that they did. I bet I've had the answer all along."

"What is it?" Kronos asked.

"Well, I've been trying to remember everything from when it all happened…everything that I could remember anyway…my memory of it all is extremely vague now, but last night I recalled something that one of the Watchers said about me when he thought I was unconscious. He called me an abomination…these men who are supposed to record and document everything we do, they think because we are what we are that we're lesser the humans than they are. It's the same old story, it just never dies, just finds new victims. First it was the religious, then it was the conquistadores, then it was the slave traders and then the Nazis, they torture and kill anybody who's different from them because just because they're not _exactly_ the same, they think their victims don't feel anything, that they don't have any souls and therefore can't feel anything and don't matter at all." She looked up at her husband as she added, "But I'll tell you something, given a choice between us and them, _they're_ the abomination, not me, not us."

Kronos nodded.

"Anybody who would sacrifice another human life in the name of difference is the true abomination. They think they have a right to do whatever they want to us because we can't die, because we heal, who in the HELL are they to say what we are and they aren't? If I had my way I'd track every last one of them down and put them through the _EXACT_ same hell that they did to me. But you know how they are…they find a quick solution to any problem, they wouldn't have to deal with it as long as I would…if one of them would have to carry the baby, they'd shell out a couple hundred dollars and get an abortion…well, if they did I hope they'd get some butcher of a professional who doesn't care much about sterilization and also doesn't care too much of where he does it. I hope…"

Abigail couldn't finish her thought because she'd started crying again. Kronos pulled her to him and put his arms around her. He didn't know what to say to her, he knew that there was nothing he could say that could ever help her. He stood up from the table and pulled her up alongside him. She was still out of it so he picked her up and carried her up the stairs back to the bedroom and set her down in the bed and tucked her in. It seemed that Abigail had fallen asleep, or so Kronos thought until he got into bed beside her.

He felt her reach over and lay her hand on his ribs.

"Kronos?" she said in a tired voice.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I love you…"

He almost laughed.

"I love you too."

"Kronos."

"What?"

She didn't answer him for a minute, then she said, "There's something I want to say but I don't know if I should."

"What is it?"

Abigail turned on her side and said in his ear, in a tone so quiet he almost couldn't hear her, "Make love to me."

Kronos about jumped out of his skin when he heard that. As he had said before, the last time they had done that was over 80 years ago and truth be known, that last time wasn't so much what they originally had in mind when they checked into the hotel, just a way to make the minister and his wife in the next room extremely uncomfortable.

He rolled onto his side and sat up and looked at Abigail and he asked her, "Are you sure?"

She nodded and reached for him again, Kronos backed up and fell out of the bed and onto the floor.

"Well this should be a barren source of amusement," Abigail said as she watched him get back to his feet.

She tried to grab him again but he pulled away from her again.

"Don't do that," he said as he sat down on his side of the bed.

"What's wrong?" Abigail asked.

Kronos wasn't sure how to answer her.

"What is it?" she asked, "What's wrong?"

He looked at her and answered, "You really want to know? I'm afraid I'll hurt you. After what you've been through, I don't know…"

"Remember what I told you when we married," she said, "You won't hurt me."

"I don't want to," Kronos replied as he rested his head on her stomach, "But I'm worried I might."

"You won't," Abigail told him.

He looked up at her, "And how do you know?"

"You never have before," she said.

"I know, but things are different now," he said.

"Maybe not," she told him, "Kronos, it'll be allright, I know it will."

Kronos felt the breeze of the cool night air come in through the window, that mixed with the scent of Abigail's perfume and the overwhelming sensation of being as close to her as he was, all made the situation almost a temptation he couldn't turn down. However he still worried that he might hurt her. It wasn't that he worried so much this time about becoming rough with her, he worried that since the procedure the Watchers performed on her, maybe something had gone wrong then. He remembered how much pain she was in every day she was pregnant, and every day the pain went from her stomach down to her groin, and that was when the pain was at a bare minimum, some days it spread throughout her whole body. He just wasn't sure that since then whether or not something might've happened that he _would_ hurt her.

But he saw that she was certain about this, even if he wasn't. He placed his hands on her shoulders and tried to kiss her but she turned away.

"What is it?" he asked.

She smiled at him and said, "Take your clothes off first."

He did, and it being the first time he had done this with her in over 80 years, he was glad the lights were off because he was sure he looked rather odd by this time. When he got undressed and settle back on the bed, even in the dark he could see the ever so slight smile that formed on Abigail's face.

"Allright, now if you start to feel any kind of pain, let me know and I'll stop," Kronos told her.

Her smile grew larger as she said, "Kiss me, you son of a bitch."

He did, and in that moment, each felt a strange sensation come over them as if after what felt like an eternity of wandering the earth being lost, they were both home again.

* * *

It was early in the morning and the sun would come up soon. The strong night wind continued to blow in through the windows. Kronos had already been up for a while, he looked over to the other side of the bed and watched Abigail as she slept. She made no sound except for her light, steady breathing, which was so light Kronos had to watch to see if the sheet moved over her stomach to make sure she was still breathing.

She looked now to be truly at peace when she slept. The night before seemed to Kronos like it occurred a lifetime ago instead of just a few hours, and now was the hard part, waiting. Abigail had made no indication that she had been hurt, however he also noted she remained unusually passive all through the night and just stayed where she lay, nothing like how she used to behave at all when they used to make love. Kronos worried that when she woke up, he was going to hear something that he had spent the whole night dreading.

Abigail took in a rather large breath and opened her eyes.

"Hey," she tiredly said.

"Hi…how're you feeling?"

She grinned as she started to sit up. "I'm fine," she replied, "And you?"

"You know what I mean," Kronos said, "I didn't hurt you?"

"Of course not," she said, "I told you that you wouldn't, maybe now you'll believe me."

"I just don't want anything to happen to you again," Kronos told her.

"I know, I know you worry about me, but I'm fine, Kronos, I swear," she said.

"I know," he replied, "And I'm very grateful for it."

He pulled her to him and held her close for a minute. Abigail was still caught up in a haze from last night but after a moment it started to pass and she realized there was something Kronos wasn't telling her.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

Kronos pulled away and explained, "I think I may have found the men who attacked you, however to make sure they don't get away again I'm going to have to follow them, word got out last night that they're assigned to some project over in Washington."

"Oh I see," Abigail said as she drew the sheet up around her body, "You're going away and you don't know when you're coming back…and I guess I'm just going to have to stay around here in this ghost town with a yellow ribbon 'round my throat, counting the hours and days until you return like a good little wretch, er, wife."

Kronos laughed, "I'm not saying that…maybe you'd like to go back to New Mexico since it _is_ your home, while you wait for me, providing you do wait."

She nodded. "I will wait, you know that."

"Unless," Kronos started.

"Unless what?"

"Unless you'd rather come with me."

Abigail shook her head, "I don't want to see those men again as long as I live."

Kronos nodded in understanding and he asked her, "Do you think you'll be allright by yourself until I come back?"

"I'm an old woman, Kronos, I can take care of myself," she said, "But, I do want to thank you for watching over me these last few months, it's been nice not to be alone."

"I know what you mean," he replied.

He kissed her and pulled her into another embrace and held her for a moment.

"I hate having to leave you like this," he said, "But I want to find those men and I want to make them pay for what they did to you…last night I got to thinking about what you said."

"What did I say?" she asked.

"About how they think Immortals are an abomination when they're the real ones…they think just because we don't die that we're some sort of mutant or something, not human like themselves, ha! Well I got to thinking about what you said, they treat Immortals like the Nazis did the Jews and the gypsies…I think a little genocide would be in order with them."

As Abigail realized what he was saying, she threw back the covers and started getting dressed.

"When do you leave?" she asked.

"Well not for a few hours yet," he told her, "It's not even six in the morning yet."

"Well," Abigail said as she got out of bed, "When do you think you'll be back?"

"Can't quite say, I'd figure a month at the most," Kronos answered.

"A month," she said, "One glorious month…yes I'll wait for you, and when you get back, tell me all about how much they suffer."

As she stood in the middle of the room in her underwear and the shirt she'd worn the day before, she grabbed Kronos and clung to him for a minute as if she didn't want the time between then and when he would have to leave, to end.

"I still feel bad about leaving you like this," he said.

"Why's that?" she asked.

"Well for one thing I was never the sort to make love and run."

She laughed, "What, you were never with a woman whose husband came home early?"

"I was never with a woman whose husband was somebody else," Kronos said.

Abigail smiled. "You go on and do what you need to do and then you come back to me," she told him.

"Yes ma'am."

* * *

The next month didn't pass quite as planned but it was made the most of. Abigail walked with Kronos to the airport and then returned to the house for the last three days of her lease, then took her bags and her money and hopped a train heading back to New Mexico. She returned home and did count the days until Kronos returned. It was much to her relief to find that from the day she returned, no Watcher ever set foot anywhere near her house again, let alone into her front yard.

Also when she returned home, when she worked herself up to go to her bedroom, she cleaned out the dresser drawer of its cotton and blankets and pillows and placed it back into her dresser. As horrible as it all was to think about, she was glad now that she hadn't had anything for her baby, no crib, no cradle, no nursery room with pink or blue papered walls. It still hurt her to think about it all but she felt she was healing from the whole incident.

At the end of the month, Abigail highly anticipated her husband's return and he didn't let her down. That very night he came home just as she was making dinner. Abigail jumped into his arms and held onto him for a minute or two before she asked him how things went. Kronos kissed her on the forehead and went over to the table.

"I'm beat," he said, "I had to hop five different trains in the last 24 hours to get back home and this last week I've gotten a total of 8 hours worth of sleep and 6 of those hours were leaning against a wall."

"But did you find them?" Abigail asked, "Those men I mean. Are they dead?"

"They won't be bothering you, or any other Immortal, anymore, yes they're dead," Kronos said, "And it wasn't quick, or merciful, or painless, I can assure you of that."

"But you're sure it was the right men?"

"Yes it was, I know this because in the first week I spent torturing them, I got all the details out of them on the how and why of the procedure they put you through," Kronos said.

"The why?" Abigail asked, "You mean you found out their reason for doing it?"

"Apparently there are some 10 or 15,000 Immortals in this world currently that the Watchers know about, one coming up missing and then coming up pregnant is no skin off anyone's nose," Kronos explained, "They picked you because you were convenient, the 'right place at the right time', they would've done it to any Immortal they could've grabbed…I know I've done some pretty gruesome things in my time but these men make the Holocaust look like the Boston Massacre. To them, any Immortal is ripe for the picking, just a lab rat to experiment on, and whoever said a little knowledge was dangerous knew what he was talking about because that is _exactly_ the case here. They wonder what would happen to an Immortal if something happened to one and they carry out the something to see for themselves."

"No!" Abigail said as she stood next to him.

"Oh, Abigail, it took three weeks to finally kill those bastards and after that, I just couldn't get back here quickly enough to make sure you were allright," Kronos said.

Kronos dropped his head against Abigail's chest and she could feel the heaviness of his exhaustion.

"You poor thing," she said, "You must be about ready to drop."

"Don't tempt me," he replied.

She ran her hand through his short hair and said, "Why don't you go lay down for a while and I'll hold off dinner until you're ready?"

He shook his head, "I'm not moving from this spot. I'm just so glad to see you again, you _are_ allright aren't you?"

"Yes I'm fine," she insisted as she walked back over to the stove.

Kronos' face met with the tabletop and he was half asleep, but there was something more to his present condition than he was ready to tell Abigail just yet.

"I hope you like what I'm making for dinner," she said.

"I'm too tired to care, what is it?" he asked.

"Nothing new, fried chicken, fried tomatoes, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob and watermelon."

"I don't care, I'm too tired to care, I'll eat the potatoes with the skin on and the cornmeal raw, I don't care."

Abigail took a bottle of tomato wine off the wine rack and put it in the freezer to cool off.

"You poor thing, you look half past dead…what exactly went on for the last three weeks?" she asked.

Kronos shook his head, "It doesn't matter, it's over."

"Try picking your face up and telling me that again, I can't understand half of what you say when you talk into the fiberglass," Abigail said as she sat down at the table.

Kronos sat up straight and looked at her.

"How many of those men were there when you were attacked? 10? 20?"

"I don't know, I think maybe eight or ten," Abigail said.

"Well, they died last, but to get to them I took out about five more," Kronos said.

"Kronos, that many Watchers come up dead so close together, aren't people going to start wondering what's going on?" she asked.

"Maybe they will but they won't trace it back to you," he told her, "Look, look, I know you want to hear about what happened, and after all you've been through you're probably entitled to it, but I'm too tired to go into all the details now. I promise later I'll tell you."

She patted his hand and stood up, "I'll get dinner ready and then I'll help you upstairs."

"Thank you," he tiredly murmured as he laid his head down on the table again.

* * *

After dinner, Abigail took Kronos upstairs and over to the bathroom. She turned on the taps on the bathtub and took off Kronos' clothes, he seemed too exhausted to even realize what was going on around him. She gave him a hard shove and he cracked his back falling into the tub.

"Welcome back to the world of the living, my dear," she said, "Kronos, I realize something's wrong that you're not telling me, if you don't want to, that's fine, but will you please act as if there's something else on your mind so I don't have to wonder about it?"

He thought about telling her what had happened. Maybe he should.

"Abigail."

"What?"

He couldn't do it.

"Just don't drown me," he said.

She smiled like the Cheshire cat. "I'd never," she told him.

"I've heard that before," Kronos said.

"Shut up," Abigail said as she dunked his head under the water.

She spent the next half hour washing and scrubbing Kronos until there wasn't a mark left on him. Then she pulled the drain plug and helped him to get up out of the tub, she took a towel off the rack and started drying him off.

"Next we'll get you settled down into bed and we'll…"

She stopped when Kronos grabbed her, before she could ask what was wrong, he swooped her up in his arms and took her into the bedroom where he threw her on the bed and she was immediately pinned to the mattress by his bodyweight. She tried pushing him off of her but he was too heavy.

The first thing he said to her was, "I'm not going to hurt you."

"I know," she said.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he said again, as if he was trying to convince himself rather than her, "I just…I spent four weeks wondering what was happening to you, I worried by the time I got back I might be too late…I have to know that this is real, and you're allright, and I'm not just seeing things."

"I understand," she said.

He pinned her shoulders down and kissed her. As he did, Abigail had the weirdest sensation come over her that she could actually feel the fear that had gone through Kronos for the last month.

"I love you," he said.

"I know," she replied.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he told her again.

"I know."

* * *

A man who emigrates from Sicily to Los Angeles will kiss the land as soon as he gets off the boat for relief of being off the God forsaken ship and away from the God forsaken ghetto. Kronos having been away from his wife for a month and worrying about her wellbeing every minute of that month, to come back and find her allright, tried to kiss every inch of her body, but he fell asleep halfway down her collarbone.

Abigail tried to move out from under him but he was too heavy. She placed her hands at the sides of his head and lifted it off her stomach and rolled him over to the other side of the bed. She got up and quietly slipped down the back stairs to the kitchen, she crossed over to the fridge and took out a cold beer and took a large swig of it.

"Abigail," she heard.

She turned and saw Kronos coming down the stairs, he seemed a bit more composed now and dressed, but he still looked tired.

"Kronos."

"I know I've been acting weird since I got home, I didn't mean to scare you," he said.

"You didn't scare me," she replied.

"You were right, there is something else that's been on my mind," he told her, "And I wasn't sure whether to tell you or not, but I think I should."

"What is it?" she asked.

"You trust me?"

"Yes."

He held out his arms, "Come here."

Abigail, a bit nervously, walked over to Kronos and put her arms around him. She felt his own hold tighten around her.

"I'm not crazy," Kronos said, "I'm sorry that I scared you…it's just that my life as I know it has been turned upside down and I don't know what's going to happen."

"What's wrong?" Abigail asked.

"Those Watchers I killed, they had with them information and leads to other Watchers. Their pictures, their names, their addresses, everything," Kronos explained.

"I still don't understand," Abigail said, "What's that got to do with how you're acting now?"

Kronos went over to the only bag he'd taken with him and come home with from his time in Washington. He put it on the table and opened it up and started digging through papers and photographs and cards. He pulled out a photograph and showed it to Abigail. There was a man in the picture, he appeared to be somewhere in his 30s, tall and scrawny with a short spiky haircut, eyes that didn't seem to open all the way and an unusually large nose.

"What about him?" Abigail asked.

"Well I checked, his name is Adam Pierson, he's been in the Watchers now for about ten years or so," Kronos said.

"I still don't follow, I don't think you've ever told me about anybody named Adam Pierson and he sure enough isn't one of the men who were there with me that night," Abigail said.

"Abigail," Kronos sounded to be hanging onto his sanity by a thread, "This is Methos. My brother is alive and what more he's one of those bastards!"


	8. Chapter 8

Author's note: Well folks, here we are at the end of the line on this story. I hope all the readers have enjoyed it, I know I've certainly enjoyed writing it. I'd like to thank everybody who has reviewed it and made their opinions known, and once again many thanks to Shadow3418 for her enormous support as well.

Abigail looked at the picture again. She couldn't believe that this was the man that her husband had talked about oh so often. Also she couldn't very well see this man as being one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, raping and pillaging and setting fire to everything that didn't move and slaughtering everything that did. For crying out loud, the man in the picture looked like a university student.

"This is Methos? Kronos, are you sure about that?"

"I know my own brother!" Kronos replied, "That bastard!"

"Kronos, there's got to be a mistake…from what you told me, Methos doesn't sound like the type of person who'd go in for this kind of stuff," Abigail said.

"It's him, it's him, I know it is! My brother, my own brother, working with those bastards!"

Now Abigail was worried because it seemed Kronos was losing hold of any sanity he had left in him.

"For centuries I thought he was dead, I never bothered looking for him, and now THIS!"

Kronos slammed his head against the table and Abigail grabbed him by the wrist and started pulling him to the staircase.

"Come on, Kronos," she said, "You're going out of your mind with this, you're not making any sense. Let's get you to bed and you can calm down."

Kronos struggled with her the entire trip up the stairs. She dragged him into the bedroom and shoved him over to the bed. He fell flat against the mattress and Abigail got on top of him to try and keep him from getting up again.

"Kronos, can you hear me?" she asked.

However all the fight seemed to have gone out of Kronos as well as all comprehension of what was going on around him. It was as if he were a completely different man though staying in the same body. All he could do now was hit his head against the pillows and cry.

"My brother…my brother," he repeated in a low voice.

It was then that Abigail realized she didn't know her husband at all. Here he was falling to pieces over a man who he called brother, a man who poisoned him and buried him 2,000 years ago. A man who now it seemed had sided with the enemy.

"Poor thing," she said as she gently stroked the back of his head.

Kronos never heard a word she said. All he did was thrash from side to side murmuring, "My brother…I love him…I _hate_ him…I want him dead!"

* * *

"You're sure this is Methos?" Abigail asked the next morning as she looked over the picture again, "There couldn't be some mistake?"

"What mistake?" Kronos asked.

"Well, I don't know…everybody says that everybody in this world has a double, a doppelganger or something…maybe this is his."

"No," Kronos shook his head, "I recognize that face anywhere, it's Methos and it can _only_ be Methos."

Kronos kicked the kitchen radiator as he exploded saying, "I DON'T BELIEVE THIS!"

Abigail looked over the picture again for what must have been the hundredth time. Something just didn't seem right.

"I just don't understand, _why_ would your brother work with people like this?" she asked.

Kronos thought about it for a minute and an idea came to him.

"I'll bet I know why he would," Kronos said, "My brother's a survivor, he's not the best fighter and he's not the strongest man, but he's the survivor. He'll do whatever it takes to keep his head, it's what he's always done, and Methos is a 5,000 year old man."

"I don't get it," she said.

"Of course you don't…a lot of Immortals want the head of a 5,000 year old man, they think it would mean something. They think he's supposed to be some wise idol or something but he's not, he's…a conniving bastard who's done nothing but lie to me his whole life," Kronos said.

"A man you once called brother," Abigail reminded him.

"That was a long time ago," Kronos replied.

"So was his leaving you…do you really think he would join a group of people who hunt Immortals to stay alive?"

"Well why not?" Kronos asked, "Whoever heard of an Immortal hiding in the Watchers, a group the Immortals aren't even supposed to know about?"

Abigail looked at him, without saying a word, reminding him that he had thought of the exact same thing himself. In fact he still wore the tattoo on his wrist to fool people.

"It makes sense," Kronos said, "It _would_ be like him to hide in with those bastards because they're attacking Immortals and that would mean that there would be less to come after his head…it all goes together, it just reeks of my brother."

"You're not so fresh today yourself," Abigail told him.

He looked at her sharply through the corner of one eye, a warning to her not to get smart with him, he wasn't in the mood.

"So what are you going to do?" she asked.

"I'm going to kill him, I'll kill him, I'll kill him!"

He pounded his fist down on the table, shattering the dishes. Abigail backed out of her chair and pinned herself against the wall.

"Well at least you have a plan," she cynically remarked.

Kronos turned and saw her up against the wall and he knew he was pushing his luck with her. He tried to calm down and told Abigail to come to him.

"No," she replied.

He looked at her, "What?"

"Since you woke up this morning you've made a demonstration of smashing everything I own, and incase you haven't noticed, I don't have 'Everlast' written on my face," she firmly replied.

Kronos realized he was licked and he went over to her with open arms. She didn't move so he pulled her a few inches away from the wall and wrapped his arms around her.

"You're right, I'm sorry, it's just that this whole thing with Methos, it's…"

"It's driving you crazy is what it's doing," Abigail said.

"I'm sorry, Abigail," Kronos said as he kissed her, "I know I've probably been scaring you out of your mind."

"I never had a mind to begin with," she replied, "But you have been working my last nerve. Just what are you going to do about your brother?"

"I don't know yet," Kronos said, "But I'm going to do something, to him and to every last one of those psychotics they call Watchers."

* * *

1997

Abigail took another drink of beer and hoped it would relax her stomach. Since beginning her story, it felt as if she had swallowed a bunch of heavy rocks and they just sat in the bottom of it. Methos sat across from her at their table in the bar, stunned by what he had just heard.

"So now you know," she said, "Kronos found out you were in the Watchers and he started planning his attack…however you were in Paris at that time and you were relocated here to Seacouver by the time he actually came for you. In between that time he went hunting for the Watchers and he found them, a whole mess of them over those three years."

Methos just shook his head as it hit him what had happened. He couldn't believe what he had just heard. Here it was on this night he had had no plans and agreed to meet MacLeod at Joe's bar, and no sooner had he gotten out of the street, he sensed the quickening of another. This strange woman who he had never seen before had come up to him and said, _"Oh my God, you're Adam Pierson!"_

He had turned around and tried to remember where he had seen her before.

"_Have we met?"_ he finally asked.

She grabbed his wrist and started walking with him into the bar and explained, _"I'm Kronos' wife, or rather I was, if he's not here then he must be dead…he is dead, isn't he?"_

That had been the opener to that can of worms, and now here it was two hours later and he felt like hell.

He was brought back to reality when he heard someone clear their throat. He looked up and Joe was standing over them at the table.

"Everything okay here, Adam?" he asked.

"Everything's fine, Joe," he replied without missing a beat.

"You two having a good time tonight?"

Abigail nodded, "It's fine."

"Good, is there anything else you need?" he asked.

Abigail looked down and shyly responded, "No thank you."

"Well okay."

Methos felt Joe slap him on the back before he headed to the stage. Once he was out of hearing range, Abigail looked over to Joe, and then back to Methos.

"Now he's okay, anybody who messes with a guy like that really ought to get stepped on, you know what I mean? You know, Methos, Immortals _do_ talk to each other…last year when he came up on trial for treason…everybody was talking about how 80 Watchers had been killed in three years. I heard that and all I could think was 'that's my husband', because you know that's just the kind of man he was. He hated the Watchers and he wanted to make sure that they all suffered because he figured they were all Hunters."

"It still doesn't make sense," Methos said, "Kronos never said anything about the Watchers."

"You know as well as I do that it's a rule of thumb, Immortals aren't supposed to know about them," Abigail said, "Kronos never stood on ceremony but he also didn't like giving away all his secrets. That way he always had a hand above other people."

Methos looked down at the table for a moment when he said, "Abigail, I am _so_ sorry about what happened to you. I never knew anything about it."

"I didn't figure you had," she said, "But I'm still angry at them. They shouldn't have broken the laws of nature and put that kid in me in the first place…but if they did, they shouldn't have tampered with it so it would die, you don't do that to a child, or its mother. All those months, being sick everyday, the constant pain and worry that every little thing would hurt it, all for nothing."

That brought Methos to a question he had been wondering all night.

"You don't mean to tell me if you had it all to do over again only with a chance the child might survive, that you would, would you?" he asked.

She looked at him and said, "Well that's just the thing, I probably would. I don't believe in abortion, never have, never will. And I always wanted a child but knew it wasn't possible, it couldn't be done."

"What if it could?" Methos asked.

Abigail didn't know what he was saying and that was obvious.

"This experiment of theirs, they had no right to do it but maybe if somebody in their right mind went over it and corrected a few things, it could be done again but properly, and the child might live," Methos said, "If that were to happen, do you think you might be willing to try it again?"

Abigail looked him dead in the eyes and said, "Methos, if you ever figure out a way that that experiment might actually work, you let me know. Kronos kept the records to that little butcher job, if you have his things now, you'll probably find them…I'm sorry about everything you've had to go through these last couple of months."

"It's okay," Methos said, "It's my own fault anyway, I thought I could walk away from my past."

"I don't know why you couldn't except Kronos couldn't let go of the past, that was his weakness, one of them anyway," Abigail told him.

She reached over and brushed away the tear Methos hadn't been aware was rolling down his cheek. He hated having to talk about his past.

"You know it's strange," she told him, "I knew Kronos, off and on for about a thousand years, and I never really knew him, but I knew things about him that nobody else ever did. That happens you know, you marry somebody and you stay with them for a long time, and you think you know them, but you never do. They have their secrets and their past and whatever they don't want to tell you, they won't, and usually they have a lot of it they're not proud of. A wife can only know so much about her husband, but nobody knows a man better than his original family. I could never fully figure him out, but I had an idea you knew more about it than I did."

"It is strange," Methos agreed, "When it was the four of us…there wasn't too much that one of us knew that the rest of us didn't. We didn't keep too much from each other, not in the beginning anyway, since we were all equals."

Abigail laughed at that. "I'm sorry for laughing," she told him, "But that's just it, where Kronos was concerned you _weren't_ equals, not really. Oh he said you were, but he never really put himself on the same level as anybody else. He was a bastard through and through, this I can't deny…but there was also a sense of nobility about him…he…he needed somebody to take care of, and in the beginning, that was you."

Methos started to laugh, "Did he ever tell you how we met?"

"No he didn't…oh he loved to pretend he hated you, and I suppose for part of it he really did, but he didn't completely. He thought he did, but I knew better, I always know better. I knew it the night he came home and told me you were in the Watchers. I knew because he cried about it, about you working with those bastards. Now, if he hated you as much as he always said he did, he wouldn't have been surprised, he certainly wouldn't have been upset because he would expect as much from you," Abigail explained.

"You know, Abigail," Methos told her, "Not all Watchers are like that."

"I know," Abigail said, her eyes glancing to Joe, "I know now. That's why I wanted to tell you what really happened. Jacob Galati was only a small part of the Watchers' problem and it had absolutely nothing to do with MacLeod meeting that bartender. When somebody screwed Kronos over, he didn't let them get away with it, he was smart but clearly not smart enough, or else he'd still be alive. But he knew better than to just go on a rampage and start turning every Watcher in sight into Swiss cheese, no, he built it all up over a year or so, here and there, Watchers coming up shot, stabbed, necks broken, run off the road, explosions…only then something happened, I don't know _what_, and he started towards you."

Methos thought back to the virus and Kronos' plans for the Horsemen's return.

"I think," he said, "He decided every mortal had in them the potential to become what those Hunters were…he created a virus that had no cure, the motive, the Horsemen rule or the world dies."

"The Horsemen rule or the mortals died," Abigail said, "Only the Immortals would remain eventually."

Methos nodded, "What he was thinking at that time, I don't know...I guess nobody ever will."

"I guess not," Abigail agreed, "Kronos was a very complex man…maybe he wasn't even a whole man…perhaps rather he was made up of several men. How else could he one day be the monster he once was, and the next, crying because his little brother went off with a new group of butchers? Who knows? Maybe Kronos himself didn't know what all there was to him. Maybe that's why he always seemed to be at war with himself most of all. That's why I could never figure out why even for a man with his past, when we were together he worried about hurting me. That's not what you hear from a man who took pleasure in raping and killing. It's almost as if there were two sides to him, at least two anyway, one who wanted everybody to die, and another who would just kill to protect his family."

The check came and Abigail reached into her pocket, but Methos told her he'd take care of it. She stood up and got her coat and went to leave, but before she did she turned back to Methos and said to him:

"You know, Methos, I used to lay awake many a night worried, for fear that Kronos would get himself killed. But now that that's happened, I don't have to worry and wonder anymore, now I don't need to lay awake nights anymore."

No, Methos thought, she only had to go back to a cold empty bed that when she went to sleep, the other half of it would still be cold and empty, and that was his fault.

Abigail left the bar and walked out into the night rain. Methos followed a moment later and found her at the edge of the sidewalk trying to flag down a taxi.

"Abigail," he said as he came up behind her.

She turned around and asked him what he wanted.

"I hope you won't think I'm being too forward," he said, "But would you like to come with me back to my apartment? Just so you'll have a place to stay for the night."

She smiled and said, "I appreciate that, Methos, really I do, but I can't. I'm on my way to the airport to catch a plane."

5,000 years of life couldn't prepare him for the shock that followed that unexpected answer, and his disappointment was evident, even though he didn't know just why he was so upset by it.

Abigail saw the hurtful look on his face, she laughed and said, "Come here you poor thing." She pulled him to her and kissed him on his cheek and told him, "I'll be back someday, you keep someplace in your apartment free so I have a place to sleep the next time I come through and I'll take you up on your offer. But I've got to go now."

"I'm still sorry about everything that happened, probably most of it could have been avoided," Methos said.

"So could have Korea and Vietnam probably, but we as a breed of human beings endure tragedy for the sake of knowledge and progress and we move on from it, hopefully better for it than before," she replied.

Abigail went back to the curb and managed to hail a taxi, and just like that she was gone and out of Methos' life. He stood there in the cold rain, confused, this woman who two hours ago had been a total stranger, had squirmed into his life and his mind and now he felt haunted by her absence, and also by all that she had told him.

He also felt haunted by something she had said to him before she left. It reminded him of when he had first met Kronos.

That was thousands of years ago, it was another world, another life, another everything. He in that time was a slave, an obedient one for the most of it, he did what he was told and what was expected of him. He hated every minute of it but he feared losing his head even more so he endured it.

One night he was awoken by the presence of another Immortal, one who he would later come to call 'brother'. The man had snatched Methos up before he knew what had happened. He tied Methos up and gagged him, slung him over his shoulder and carried him off into the night, Methos struggling the entire way to get loose.

He remembered the fear as they arrived at the place where the other Immortals were. One of them was sitting on the ground by the fire, watching the sight before him. The next thing Methos knew, he was thrown off the other Immortal's back, and into the lap of the one at the fire.

"Well now," the second man said in a bellowing voice, "What have we here?"

Methos saw the man's scarred face and sinister smirk and he was crying by that point because he feared what was going to happen to him. If there was anything he could do that they wouldn't hurt him, he would do it. And yet, he had been warned by his master that if he ever tried to leave, he would be hunted down and killed. Methos knew if he managed to get away and went back, explaining what had happened would do him no good.

The man slipped one hand under Methos' back and propped him up to get a better look. It was then that the man realized something, and he yelled to the other man who had brought Methos there.

"Caspian you idiot! I told you to find a woman!"

The other man turned around and said, "You mean it isn't?"

The second man was surprised and said, "You _really_ mean to tell me you thought _this_ was a woman?"

"I thought she was just ugly," the first man replied.

He was going to die and he was being insulted!

The scarred man returned his attention to Methos and rested his hands near the strip of cloth in his mouth.

"If I take this off," he said, "Do you promise not to scream?"

Methos nodded, frightened for his life or whatever was to come of it.

The man took the gag out and said, "There, that's better. Well you're not exactly what I had in mind but anything's got to be better than the two morons I'm currently keeping company with."

Methos started crying harder because he was scared and he didn't know what was going to happen now. The man seemed to take pity on him.

"Come here you poor thing," he said as he pulled Methos up and held him as if he were a frightened child, "Calm down, nobody's going to hurt you."

In the beginning, Kronos had been a man of his word, and Methos had been safe with his brothers. But after a thousand years or more, something happened, he didn't know what, maybe they had changed, or maybe just he had changed, but he realized he was different from his brothers. That was something that Kronos hadn't been able to handle.

Methos' mind was brought back to the present time when he felt the quickening of another Immortal but he didn't move. He heard MacLeod get out of the car and come over to him.

"Adam, I'm sorry I'm late but I had a…"

Methos turned around and despite the pouring down rain, MacLeod saw that Methos was crying.

"Methos, what's wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing, MacLeod," Methos replied, though he knew by the way he acted right now that there was no way in hell MacLeod would believe him. "Everything's fine."

* * *

The next night when Joe had closed the bar and gone home, he had no sooner shut the door that he heard somebody knocking. Opening the door, he found Methos standing on the porch looking like death ran him over.

"Adam, are you allright?" he asked.

"I'm fine, Joe," he replied, "Mind if I come in?"

Joe held the door open for him and Methos stepped in, staggering like a drunken man.

"Are you sure you're allright?" Joe asked as he closed the door.

Methos nodded and headed over to the couch.

"Do you want a drink?"

Methos shook his head, "I need to be sober to tell you this, otherwise you might not believe me."

Joe sat down beside him and asked, "What is it?"

"It's about last year during your trial," Methos started to explain.

"What? What're you talking about?" Joe asked.

"Do you remember that woman with me at the bar last night?"

"Yeah, sure I remember her, why?"

Methos went into all the details that Abigail had told him about the night before. Kronos and the 80 Watchers, the Hunters, the baby, he told Joe about everything, and at the end of it all, he wasn't sure whether Joe believed him or not.

"You see, Joe," Methos said when he finished, "I had to tell you what happened because I remembered, at your trial they tried to pin the deaths of those 80 Watchers on you and MacLeod. Jacob Galati added to the death toll a bit, but the bunk of it didn't have anything to do with him or MacLeod or you or any of it. Kronos wanted revenge on the Hunters for what they did to Abigail…it seems the Hunters do far more than just kill Immortals, they experiment on them as if they were the SS and the Immortals were Jews during the Holocaust. I knew about the Hunters, but I swear to you I _never_ knew anything about _that_ or I would have killed them myself."

Joe didn't say anything and Methos knew that he must at that time have been thinking about Horton. Somehow he just knew that Joe wondered if those experiments were a part of the group of Hunters that Horton played a part in.

It seemed they both had problems with their families. Horton wanted to kill all Immortals and Kronos wanted to kill all the mortals because they might become like the Hunters. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic. The whole thing left Methos to wonder something and he decided to go ahead and ask even before he really thought about the possible repercussions.

"Joe," Methos said, "What do you think of me?"

"What?"

"I mean as an Immortal, does it make you uneasy when you think about how old I am? Or that I can't die?"

"Well," Joe started.

Oh boy, here they went.

"To be honest, in the beginning I thought it was pretty weird, hell, in the beginning I didn't really believe any of it…and then I saw it for myself, then it was real."

"That usually is the world of difference," Methos said.

"It doesn't bother me," Joe said, "I don't understand it but there are a lot of things I don't understand."

"That makes two of us," Methos replied, and then he thought of something else, "If you had the chance, would you want to be Immortal?"

Joe seemed to think about it for a minute before shaking his head. "I don't think so. Who wants to be a cranky old man forever? What about you? You think you'd want to be in my position?"

Methos shook his head, "I've done too many horrible things in my life, and as much as I hate living with the memories each day, I'm more afraid of what punishment is going to await me in death."

He wondered for a moment, if when he did die, if he'd be stuck with Kronos for an eternity. Now that was a punishment that couldn't be outdone. Eternity spent with the only person who had ever loved him, and who in turn had hurt him after 1,000 years of loyalty, forcing him to leave. That was the thing nobody ever understood, everybody after Kronos had loved him for one reason or another, but never for what he really was. Alexa fell in love with a hopeless romantic who would promise her anything and wouldn't take no for an answer. Cassandra had loved him in exchange for protection from Kronos. MacLeod and Richie were both roped in by the idea of an ancient wise man, all knowing, all seeing, some great Immortal…Kronos was the only person who saw him as absolutely nothing when he had absolutely nothing to offer but himself, and Kronos loved him in spite of it all. And what had happened?

Joe realized Methos was crying and he wondered what had happened that upset him so much. But he could guess. It was never easy to bring up the name of a loved one who turned on you, or forced you to turn on them.

He put his hand on Methos' shoulder and asked him what was the matter.

"It just hurts to think about it all, Kronos especially," Methos explained as he grabbed hold of his friend, as if he were holding on for his life, "As horrible a man as he was, there was a time when he was all I had, and I stayed with him, because he was my family, because he was all I had, because he kept me safe. I know that sounds horrible, but is it really so much?"

Joe felt bad for his friend. When Kronos had emerged and found Methos, there had been another war going on, between Methos and MacLeod, a war to which even now there were no winners. Even now that they had moved on past the Horsemen, things still weren't quite the same with the two, and Joe guessed things never would be the same again. Methos woud always be walking on eggshells regarding his past to MacLeod. When Kronos returned into Methos' life, everything else that up to that time had been going for him, was gone. Well, almost. MacLeod had been ready to condemn Methos from the word go, but Joe had his doubts about it all. MacLeod had honor imbedded in him from the time he was born, but Methos was from a time when surviving was all that mattered. Oddly enough when it came down to it, a middle-aged Vet could better understand the position of the world's oldest man, than a 400 year old warrior.

To Joe, it did make sense that you could stay with someone who protected you, and never dream that one day, you could be full fledged enemies because of something somebody did. MacLeod couldn't understand or forgive it because of the 10,000 lives lost, any man who took part in a war had to understand that the numbers would rack up regardless of what anybody did, that was just the way it was. Besides, Joe didn't believe for one minute that when Methos first stayed with Kronos that Kronos was as terrible as everybody remembered him as. That was the hardest part of it, leaving somebody who had stood up for you and protected you and taken care of you for so long, regardless of what they were doing…and it was very easy to go along with whatever was being done to remain like your protector, your family. It was all too easy to turn your back on everything you ever knew, to stay with the one person who seemed to understand you.

He replied to his friend, "Oh Methos, no it's not, I can understand you had your reasons for staying with him. He was your friend, he protected you, it makes perfect sense that you wanted to stay alive, hell, we all know what that's like, it's just some people are more willing to do whatever it takes than others."

Neither man spoke immediately after that, but both knew the other was automatically thinking of MacLeod. A man who could always find something worth dying for, instead of just trying to stay alive regardless of what was happening. How odd that in 400 years, life had never thrown him into a compromising situation of the sort.

"I know Kronos was horrible but he…" Methos shook his head, "I don't care what he or anyone else did, we're not abominations, and in this day and age especially, nobody has any right to treat us as we were. Since last night, all I've been able to think about is Abigail and what she had to go through, all for nothing because that's how they planned it…who does that to a person?"

"One _very_ sick bastard," Joe answered.

"No," Methos replied, "A whole group of them."

"I guess we can kid ourselves for only so long before we face facts that we're still in the Dark Ages," Joe said, "It just got too bright for anybody to tell."

Methos, who was too exhausted to cry anymore, nodded as he choked and gasped an agreement. It seemed no matter how far in time or progress you went, there were still people bearing torches and pitchforks for the innocent presumed wicked.

* * *

Methos had fallen asleep that night in the arms of his friend. Joe didn't have the heart to wake Methos up and send him home, so he laid Methos out on the couch and covered him up and let him rest. Early the next morning after a couple of phone calls, Joe went to see how Methos was doing, and he found his friend sprawled out on the couch. He shook Methos' shoulder to get his attention.

"Wake up sleeping beauty," he said, "Mac called asking about you."

Methos groaned as he buried his head under a pillow, "What did he want?"

"To know if you were here and if you were allright, I told him you were," Joe said.

"Fine," Methos grumbled as he reemerged and turned on his side.

"Methos, I got another call, you better get up," Joe told him.

Methos' eyes were open and he was sitting up. "What is it?"

"Jack Shapiro died last night."

"No! Wait…why am I surprised? He wasn't young, he wasn't healthy, I don't think he was even sane," Methos said.

"Well he didn't just die, somebody stabbed him, the police guess with a scalpel or something of that sort since the stab wounds were too short to be done by any regular knife. You wouldn't happen to know anything about this would you? Abigail didn't say anything about where she was going, did she?"

Methos tried to recollect what Abigail had told him the other night when she was leaving. All she told him was that she was going to the airport to catch a plane. She also told him that she talked with other Immortals so it was possible she wasn't even the one who killed Jack. And yet, he also remembered her saying something else. That anybody who tried to mess with a nice guy like Joe, should get stepped on, but did that really mean she would kill Jack Shapiro over Joe's trial?

Methos shook his head, "She didn't tell me anything."

"But you think she might have done it," Joe said.

Methos should've known Joe would figure him out, Joe could read him like a book.

"Kronos started something," Methos told him, "I guess Abigail decided to finish it. Don't worry, Joe, she knows that not all Watchers are Hunters, she knows more what to look for than they did when the whole mess first started. To be honest I don't think, if she did kill him, that she had anything against him personally…I think she did it because he was the brains behind your trial. Besides, a man is eager to negotiate when he's put in a coffin but Jack Shapiro has been left alone for a year, who knows what he might have been doing when she found him? And before you say anything, you can't tell me that it's not a pleasant thought to you to be rid of the Hunters as well as Watchers who order contracts on their more lenient members."

"I agree, but what if they catch her? And even if they don't, what's going to happen when she finishes with them?" Joe asked.

Methos thought about it for a minute before answering, "She'll probably come back to town and tell me all about it. I hate to say it, Joe, but as long as there are Watchers who treat Immortals like crimes against nature...like abominations, there are going to be Immortals only too happy to retaliate, and it won't end until the Watchers learn that we're just as human as they are, we just have a harder time dying."

"I know," Joe told him.

"I've tried seeing this whole thing through Abigail's point of view. The Hunters deeming Immortals as abominations are the pot calling the kettle black, and you can't burn wrought iron but people like Abigail are going to try, but they'll also leave alone the cast iron. Now, MacLeod did what he could with Shapiro, but the battle between the Watchers and the Immortals didn't end there. There may be others like Abigail who kill the Hunters, and the Hunters will hide behind their Watcher disguise, and they may some day start an all out war, and we may again someday come to a life and death trial for treason…and it's just going to repeat itself over, and over, until somebody finally learns better. People have to figure out that neither side is any better or worse than the other, so trying to mutilate and exterminate an entire breed of people for being what they are, which is beyond their control, is meaningless, regardless of their intentions."

"Amen to that," Joe said.

Joe went into the kitchen and came back with a cold bottle of wine and two glasses. He poured them each a drink and sat down beside his friend. Methos took one of the glasses and said, "To Abigail, who at this moment is living proof that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. May she get her revenge and return to us in one piece, if not better than she was when she left."

"I don't necessarily agree with what she's doing, but I can understand it. I'll drink to that," Joe said.

They clanked their glasses and had a moment of silence, remembrance for the unworthily dead, brief respect for those whose deaths couldn't come soon enough, and prayer, for those to come. Kronos had started a war with an enemy that was already digging its grave, and the war would continue without him, and Methos prayed, that it would also end, without him.


End file.
